


Odds of Roughly a Billion to One

by apiphile, jar



Category: The Used
Genre: Alcohol, Analingus, Bets, Co-Written, Coitus Interruptus, Dare, Drugs, Games, Group Sex, Injury, M/M, Multi, Other, bedtime stories for jess, cockblock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-30
Updated: 2010-03-30
Packaged: 2017-10-08 12:58:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 34,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/75868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile, https://archiveofourown.org/users/jar/pseuds/jar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A drunk Jepha makes a bet that he comes to regret quite quickly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Odds of Roughly a Billion to One

Jepha Howard has a long and illustrious history of agreeing to very stupid ideas when he's drunk: two tattoos, three girlfriends, one tour, any number of one night stands, several life-endangering dares, and letting Bert balance a can of piss on his head and then throw apples at him are just the tip of the iceberg of dumbfuck drunk shit. And Dan is exceptionally persuasive, especially when he has his hand on Jepha's crotch.

"I'm not _that_ easy," Jepha protests, flopping against the back of the booth. He doesn't even sound convincing to _himself_.

"Uh-huh." Dan waves his beer at him by the base, in real danger of sloshing it onto the table and possibly Jepha's face. "But you aaaaaare. You get off just _looking_ at, like, pictures of dicks. Imaginary ones." Dan points the neck of the bottle at Jepha's face. "Imaginary picture dicks make you hot until you _spill_, you're so easy."

There are a lot of objections Jepha could raise to this, starting with _what the fuck are you talking about_, but he's drunk, so the only one that comes out is a frowning, "Do not."

"Bet you can't go ten minutes without _soiling_ your little girl knickers," Dan says, swallowing the rest of the bottle in one go. Jepha has been hearing about his supposed little girl knickers all day and he's getting bored with it now. Dan's hand is hot and heavy on the seam of Jepha's jeans; he tries not to make any sort of needy throaty sound like the ones he can feel himself _trying_ to make, the sort that might just undermine his valiantly upheld position, and grabs at his own beer before Dan can happen to it.

"I'll go as long as you _want_ me to, asshole," Jepha slurs, because he is perverse in more ways than the advertised one, and _goddamn_ but he's fucking drunk.

Dan's smile should, in retrospect, have been a warning.

"Promise?" he says, wielding a grin that a more sober Jepha would immediately recognise as _dangerous_.

"Fuck you," Jepha says cheerfully, necking his beer.

"What do you bet me?" Dan gives his crotch a squeeze and Jepha spews beer all down himself and over most of the table. He squirms in his seat.

"Everything." Jepha glares, dripping beer onto the floor and flicking it at Dan. His glare's not very convincing when his voice comes out all stupid-drunk-breathy like that. "Everyfuckingthing." He's … quite … drunk, he's noticed. Quite. Drunk.

"Everything?" Dan repeats.

"Everything everything."

"Everything everything everything?"

"_Yes_." Jepha's not even sure what they're talking about now, just that he's covered in beer and Dan's rambling shit at him and he's horny-drunk and not getting off, what the hell.

"But do you have the receipt to prove you _own_ everything?" Dan mumbles.

"I hate you," Jepha hiccups. "And your fucking hand."

"Too late," Dan says, giving his thigh a farewell pat as he lurches toward the bathroom. "Legally binding contrabble. Signed in beer."

* * *

"I hate Los Angeles." Bert has an industrial face mask strapped to the top of his head, and he's watching the traffic fail to zip past the stationary taxi while bike couriers go flitting between idling engines like egrets between rhinos. The bajillion degree heat threatens to overwhelm the car's air-con. "Hate it hate it hate it hate it hate it. Hate. It."

"Oh _Bert_, if only you'd mentioned it every single other time you were here," Quinn snorts, engrossed in picking crud from his shoes and flicking it on the floor to the point of sticking his tongue out the corner of his mouth. "Maybe we could have picked up the entire fucking studio and moved it to … uh, fuck … San Francissssco."

"Asshole," Bert mutters, pulling the mask down over his mouth and nose and making zombie noises for a minute. And then he inhales. "Ewww. This smells like your sweaty underwear. Quinn, this is not a _jock_, this is breathing apparatus for surviving in the modern city. You fucking cunt."

"Quit sniffing my underwear," Quinn advises, still rapt with concentration over the crud on his shoes, which looks a lot like very dried-on gum, "or I will start wiping my ass on it."

Bert seizes on the opportunity almost immediately. "What do you mean, _start_? Why do you think I was sniffing it in the first pla—AUGH!"

Quinn clamps the grody-looking sneaker over Bert's nose, knocking the mask sideways. "That's better! SAY IT'S BETTER."

"AUGH YOU RAPIST," Bert shouts, trying to bat him away. "Imma call the cops and they'll put your ass in jail and fuck you inside-_out_ don't _do_ that—"

Quinn taps him on the top of the head with the shoe. "Ha. Ha." He thinks for a minute. "Could you still smuggle heroin up your ass if you were inside-out?"

Bert shrugs. "Maybe. Heroin blows, though. Fuck heroin."

"Yeah, buuuuuut, it's like … currency … in prison, right? Right?" Quinn slaps him on the head with his sneaker again. Something falls out of it onto Bert's head.

"Don't _right_ me like I know what you're talking about--" Bert stops in mid-complaint and fumbles for a pen in Quinn's backpack. "Don't write me like I know what you're talking about, don't right me like I know what you're talking abouuuuut … mmm … don't fight me like we're … something … blaaaah … fuck … out out."

He's silent and scrawling the rest of the car ride, unconscious ink scrapes on his face as he taps the rhythm of the words over his lips with the pen. Quinn sits quiet, his shoe across his lap like a sleeping baby, and taps along on his knee.

"Don't fight me 'til there's nothing left to right about … NOW …"

The house looks like it was pretty neat once, before Quinn owned it; it now looks like … like a house that used to be neat and has since been owned by Quinn. There are other descriptive terms, of course: single-storey. Sliding doors. A pool. The pervasive smell of a house that hasn't been lived in for several months. A smattering of children's play equipment going sun-bleached in the garden after the previous owner left it behind. The disapproving glances of neighbours from across the street as Quinn hops one-shoed out of the taxi. Mattresses on the floor because there's only one bed and Bert broke it last time by trying to use it as a space trampoline.

* * *

Jepha wakes with a thumping heart and a jerk as something truly horrible splits his eardrum like a hammer to the brain and shakes him out of sleep so hard he feels like he'll never get back there again. After a brief, subvocal, "_Fuck_," and curling into the foetal position in case of imminent death, his brain catches up enough to point out that it's nothing to worry about, just Bert screaming in his ear.

"INDOOR VOICE," Jepha half-whimpers, pulling a pillow over his head. This lasts about a second as a form of protection; Bert just yanks the pillow out of his hands, flings it away, and licks his face.

At least, Jepha's assuming it's Bert. He has dog breath so bad it's kinda hard to tell whether you're getting a face bath from Bert or someone more … waggy.

The warm, slightly wriggly body that flops down next to him with an elbow in his spleen is, however, too large to be a dog (well, too large to be any of the dogs they collectively own) and very definitely Bert-shaped. Bert burrows into Jepha's side and pulls the pillow back over both their faces.

"S'up, Stinky?" Jepha asks in a slightly pillow-muffled voice as Bert shoves his hands under Jepha's side and his face into Jepha's neck.

"Fuck off," Bert says indistinctly, in the face of the fact that _he_ was the one who just wormed into bed with Jepha. His voice cracks in the middle.

"You okay?"

"I SAID FUCK OFF," Bert snaps, his volume a little impeded by having his mouth pressed into Jepha-flesh.

"Okay," Jepha says soothingly, and he puts his hand over Bert's shoulder. His t-shirt is damp with probable-sweat, although again with Bert it's never smart to make assumptions about that.

After a moment or two of silence in which Jepha contemplates the slim likelihood that he'll be able to get back to sleep sometime before next month, one of Bert's hands snake down over Jepha's hip and begin toying absently with the end of his dick, twisting his dickring this way and that like a door key.

"Beeeeert," Jepha mutters into the pillow with no real irritation – it _does_ feel pretty good and the fluttering in his stomach has already started up in a prelude to a hard-on – "_Sleeping_."

"Fuck off," Bert repeats into his neck with a little less vehemence.

"No," Dan's voice says, and the mattress dips. "Bad Bert. Bad Jepha."

Bert hurls the pillow at him and sits up abruptly. "FUCK OFF!"

"Jepha's on sex probation," Dan explains with a horrible grin, which has the unexpected side-effect of broadening Bert's early morning vocabulary significantly.

"What?" Bert tucks his hair behind his ears and Jepha curls up into a ball and groans. Just when he's managed to put it all out of his mind, the whole miserable fucking irritating stupid bet pops back up like a teenager's dick all over again. "_Sex probation_? Whaaaaaat? What? WHAT?" He smacks Jepha with the remaining pillow. "Why are you on sex probation, Jepharee? What does that even _mean_?"

"It means," Dan says before Jepha can even come up with an excuse, "he's not allowed to shoot his wad until I say so." Dan rolls off the bed and onto his feet, smacking Jepha on the ass on his way out. "Have fun. But not _too_ much fun."

"How much did you bet?" Bert asks, having apparently lost interest in manhandling Jepha's manhood. Jepha's dick, however, has really not lost interest in being manhandled; the urge to just jerk off right here and now is almost unavoidable. Even if Bert will, in all probability, offer constructive criticism and a running commentary with barnyard noises; and it will involve _losing_.

"I don't remember," Jepha says crossly, dragging his fingers away from his burgeoning semi-on, "I was drunk."

"It doesn't count if you're drunk," Bert says with the cheerful hypocrisy of the very experienced philanderer, "I'll totally blow you." He doesn't look like he actually has any intention of going through with this but one can really never tell with Bert.

"Are _you_ drunk?" Again, it doesn't pay to make assumptions.

"No-ooooo-ooo."

"Then it counts." Jepha rolls onto his stomach in an attempt to shut his dick the fuck up, but it has the opposite effect; now humping the mattress is looking like an inviting and viable plan. "And before you ask, _yes_, it counts if you're drunk. Or I'm drunk. Or if you do it through a pillowcase." He realises he's grinding his hips into the bed and stops with a jerk. "It fucking counts if I _come_."

"Huh," Bert says in a thoughtful voice. "Does it count if _I_ come?"

Jepha reaches sideways and pulls the pillow over his head. "Kill me. Please. Just. Kill me."

* * *

"Here's the thing: the thing is, there's a real lack of hat-related ponds in today's modern, fucking, dwelling."

"As the owner of a fucking dwelling and a hat, I strongly agree."

Quinn is reclining like a Florida retiree resplendent and repugnant in hibiscus Hawaiian print shorts, a polo shirt made of something more synthetic than polyester, and golf socks. Fluoro golf socks. Disrupting the 'old man whose blind wife chooses his clothing' image is the sombrero perched on top of his head. A hat of proportions so epic it could declare itself a republic and break away from America as an extremely sun-safe rogue state.

"I'm glad you have such strong feelings on the matter," Dan says, already crouching by the pool with what had previously been the iced tea jug in his hands. Jepha suspects with a kind of boozy fatalism that the jug will never, ever be fit for containing iced tea again. It's just a hunch, but it's the kind of hunch that has years of experience and pee behind it. "As the owner of a fucking hat I feel that you are ideally situated to fucking have a fucking hat full of fucking water."

"Noooooo," Quinn says, putting his hands over his eyes in what looks like a sarcastic imitation of Jepha at his most pliable. Either that or Quinn's really fucking drunk.

Dan stands with a jug full of dirty pool water and holds Quinn's hat steady on his head. "Prepare yourself, Quinn Allman, to become _a place of natural beauty_."

"I already _have_ bugs in my ass."

"CRABS IN YOUR PUBES," Bert offers helpfully. A thunderstruck look steals over his face, the advent of an idea shining in his eyes.

"Needs more camera," Dan says, a critical eye on his brand new water feature.

Bert springs into action and darts to Jepha's bag. A second later Jepha's clothes, books, sex toys, CDs, and spare cash are strewn over the grass like the innards of a road kill kitty and Bert's shaky-cam is ready to immortalize this great moment in history: the bringing together of an excessive piece of faux-Mexican novelty headgear and a very small wildlife sanctuary populated largely with children's bath toys that no one can remember buying.

Jepha more or less _inhales_ what's left of his iced tea straight from the icky plastic bottle and views the carnage of his bag with a stoicism born of long experience and a slightly too-full bladder…

…pressing on his prostate.

Great. Now he can't even fucking _pee_. His dick is fully out of commission. He might as well cut it off and feed it to Bert's dog. Or one of Dan's. He's not feeding his dick to Zelda, though. That would be _weird_.

Quinn sits very still as water dribbles through the gaps in his sombrero, and Dan carefully drops another bath ducky into the gradually shrinking pond. If Jepha was in the mood to acknowledge it, he'd say he's pretty impressed that they got a watertight hat. Or at the diligence with which they've selected only the smallest and finest of bath-time toys, or at how Bert has apparently not noticed that he has one foot in the pool as he films it.

Quinn says, "I should get a government grant for this shit. I have a breeding hat."

"No one is going to breed with your hat," Jepha calls, barely bothering to look up from the table. More important than whether or not they _would_, no one _should_ breed with his hat. Or his shirt, shorts, and golf socks, in case it causes there to be any more of the hideous things in the garden.

"I'm gonna fuck his hat," Bert contradicts, wobbling on one foot.

Jepha squeezes his eyes shut and gives up for lost both the camera and all the footage currently on it, including the several videos of his ass getting pounded which he may or may not have been tormenting himself with because he's a fucking idiot.

"Use a condom," Jepha advises, opening his eyes a crack.

Dan snatches the camera from Bert's hands and, with the other hand, pokes him in the chest, one long forefinger to sternum; it appears he even gets Bert in shot in time to film him as he falls sideways into the pool with a surprised yell.

"YOU FUCKING WHORE!" Bert screams. "IT'S COLD."

"I'll save you, baby," Quinn says, dripping sarcasm like sweat, stationary as before, only his foot twitching. His hat slips slowly over to one side, down over one ear; Dan and Jepha watch with carefully blank faces as the inevitable gently but inexorably transpires.

"MOTHERFUCKER!" Quinn announces as a jug and a half of pool water pours out of the brim of his hat and all over his back and shoulder. "MOTHERFUCKING FUCKERRRRRR—" he tears the hat from his head and stamps on it, soggy and enraged in the late afternoon sun as Dan doubles up laughing and Jepha hiccups into his sleeve.

"SAVE ME, YOU FUCKER," Bert shrieks, splashing about like a sea lion and spitting pool water in his general direction. "I'm a mermaaaaid."

"If you're a mermaid he doesn't need to save you," Dan says, still filming Quinn. "Also, he broke Nature Land. Quinn has to be punished for being an asshole and a nature-hater."

"Fuck nature," Quinn barks, kicking his sombrero savagely. "Nature just … fucking … jizzed down my fucking back."

"And yet when Bert—" Jepha begins, but he bites off the rest of the sentence. Dan's smirking at him, and Jepha flips him the bird. There's another bottle of this weird Belgian iced tea in the fridge, he can go and get that and –

"Quinn, stop shirking your duty," Dan says, filming him. "Get wet."

Jepha snorts and stretches his torso out across the garden table. From where he's half-lying, his ribs humped up over the rim, his arms folded under his head and his empty ice tea bottle rolling between his palms, he can see the remnants of his carefully-packed backpack lying over the grass: underwear. New t-shirts, gym socks, his iPod, a paperback novel he probably wasn't going to read anyway before it ended up spine-up in the dubious weeds.

There's a buttplug, purple, which will be ever after unusable, unless he can disinfect it a thousand times before next use. There's a small drugstore's-worth of lube sachets. If anyone ever needed evidence that he, Jepha Howard, likes things in his ass _almost_ as much as the jerk currently refusing to jump in the pool then all they need to do is examine the garden.

"I'll get you wet in your little girl knickers," Bert crows from the pool, splashing water up and only managing to slop it over Quinn's feet.

Quinn stares down at his feet and shakes the cold, dirty pool water back at Bert like an uppity cat that just walked in piss. "Asshole. These socks are—"

"An affront to humanity," Jepha shouts, not lifting his head. "Your socks fucking suck."

"Stop being a pissy bitch," Bert says, splashing more. It's impossible to tell who he's talking to now, Jepha or Quinn, although Jepha acknowledges that really, he could mean both of them. Quinn's still trying to shake water off his sneakers like it will actually change the fact his feet are soaking or the one where he's going to end up in the pool one way or another, and Jepha's acutely aware that he, himself, Jepha, is sulking.

"Your mom is a pissy bitch," Quinn says, scowling. He dances around on one foot. "I got momjuice on me and it stiiiiinks."

Dan moves the camera away from his eye for a minute and smiles at Jepha. Jepha puts his hands over his head and flicks the iced tea bottle away. No. It's not that he doesn't recognise that smile, know exactly what it means, it's just that he's exercising free will.

He looks up and Dan winks at him.

Free will. It's getting exercised, right this fucking minute. Along with his hangover and the sun beating down on his shoulders, and the gentle whiny demands of his bladder, _pee pee pee pee_, and the less gentle but much more whiny demands of his fucking balls, _come come come_.

"Save meeeeee," Bert sings, spinning round and round in the water. "Save me save me save me from your mom's massive vagina or I'm going to drooooown I'm going dooooown dowwwwwn—"

"You're going to turn into Amy Lee," Jepha mutters, but Bert either can't hear him or doesn't care or, most likely, cannot remember who the fuck Amy Lee is and will be mocking Jepha for a week if Jepha admits to knowing.

"I hope you drown," Quinn says with the kind of bitterness that's always alarming if you don't realise it's entirely faked. "I hope you choke on your mom's cuntjuices. My sneakers. My socks. Oh my god. I am _wet_." He's starting to sound like a valley girl.

"Stop playing with your clit then," Dan says, still grinning at Jepha over the top of the camera. He waggles his eyebrows, and Jepha feels like maybe, maybe he's misinterpreted the wink. Maybe it's not a _let me fuck with your head_ wink.

Maybe it's a _you know what to do now_ wink.

Jepha gets up very slowly and tries not to laugh to himself. He's always been shitty at stealthily sneaking up on people for this precise reason; he can't contain the sniggers before he jumps out on them. Fortunately, Bert and Quinn are still shouting at each other, the kind of rapturous, mutually-abusive love-song that would lead the neighbours to complain if there were any in earshot.

He steps sideways over the sad and scattered remains of his belongings, over the disembowelled carcass of his bag, and shuffles like a, a fucking ninja crab, to the edge of the pool. Staying out of Dan's reach, staying quiet and smiling, and smiling, and trying really fucking hard not to start laughing.

"Your mom sucks dicks in McDonald's," Bert says, splashing more water at Quinn. Some of it gets Jepha's leg, but Jepha bites his tongue and pretends it isn't cold because a yelp of dismay might conceivably give the game away. "For fifty cents. And gives change. Bam." Bert makes gunfingers at Quinn. "Bam. Bam bam."

Quinn shakes his head. He looks like a cranky old man, and, in those shorts, the kind of cranky old man who keeps candy for little girls and boys; Jepha wishes Dan had never made that comparison because he can't get it out of his head. _Quinn Allman, you look like a paedophile_. Great. "After all my mother did for you, Robert McCracken," he says in a distressingly adult voice, "to think you'd lower yourself to—"

Jepha takes a final sidestep and smacks into Quinn with his hips at the same time that Dan reaches out and prods him in the back.

The splash as Quinn narrowly avoids landing on Bert's head is big enough to soak Jepha to the knees but it's so totally worth it; Dan's laughing too hard to film any longer, Bert's howling and probably closer to drowning _now_ than he ever was before, and it's pretty fucking hilarious and Dan's hand is abruptly on the back of Jepha's neck.

"Don't push me," Jepha says quietly.

"Cunt whore cunt cunt cunt whore," Quinn shouts, but it's Bert he's splashing and there are horrifically shrieky giggles tearing up the bright blue sky like steak knives.

"I'm not going to shove you in the pool," Dan says, and reaches back to prop the camera back on Quinn's recently-vacated lounger. His hand is oddly cold in the hot afternoon, cold and refreshing. And maybe if Jepha'd come at all in the last few days he'd just find it refreshing, but he's already acutely aware of Dan's skin touching his. Not … horny, just … aware. _Aware_ of his proximity.

There's a surcease in the shouting from the pool; Jepha squints out of the corner of his eye and notes with fidgety amusement that Bert and Quinn are trying to hold each other's heads underwater and kiss at the same time. Like they're thirteen or something.

Dan's hand is heavy on his nape, fingers rough, squeezing the sun-warmed skin, his tattoos. "But I might push you a bit."

"Fuck _off_," Jepha complains, but it comes out whiny and unconvincing.

There's a splutter from the pool and Bert squawks, "This pool tastes of your dick."

"Your mom tastes of my _mgggfffhhhhh_\--you prick—"

Jepha holds up his hands in the world's most futile attempt to ward Dan off. Dan rubs his thumb over his jugular, back and forth, slow and gentle and rough-skinned, and Jepha's stupid traitor dick stirs a little in his pants. Dan's thumb is long and bony and his fingers are huge and his hand is heavy and Jepha feels like he's being slowly compressed from above and tugged upwards by his crotch at the same time. Stupid body. Stupid libido. Stupid _having been so spoilt until now_. Shit.

There's a bump against his hip; Dan's closer now, his proximity casting a literal as well as a metaphorical shadow over Jepha's fucking crotch. "Fuck off?" Dan enquires, rubbing down the side of Jepha's neck and pressing his crotch into Jepha's hip at the same time; there's definitely something in there that's not as squashy as it is when it's disinterested. "Fuck off?"

"No," Jepha admits, as there's a kind of _ripply_ noise from the pool.

"So you don't have to turn around," Dan says in a very low voice, "They're trying to fuck with their clothes on." He runs his other hand up the inside of Jepha's thigh, and Jepha stands very still, staring back at the house and thinking resolutely about video games. La, la, la. Halo. La la la. Katamari Damacy. La. La. Dan's hand is cupping his crotch like a raw egg, careful, kind, and – okay, that's too much of a squeeze for a raw egg. Jepha bites his tongue. Fucking Mario fucking Kart fuck. "All that porn," Dan murmurs in the same low voice, jerking Jepha from his reverie as effectively as his hand is, "you think they might have worked out you take your clothes off."

"Not always," Jepha says, putting his hand over Dan's and pushing it harder into his crotch. It's stupid. Stupid. Dan's hand, pressure, the friction of his underwear against his piercing, the head of his dick. It hurts a little. It hurts a lot. He's got a fucking semi and Dan can feel it.

"Not always," Dan agrees.

"MY BALLS ARE CHAFING," Quinn shouts, and there's a sound which just _has_ to be a wet slap. "Watch what you're --- oh you're going to _die_\--"

"GET OFF MY DICK YOU HOMO," Bert screams in reply.

Jepha chokes on a snigger, then on a much deeper sound as the hand on the back of his neck slides around to rest like a necklace on his collarbones, Dan's thumb taking up a new position over his pulse.

"Your heart's a little fast, Mr Howard, are you anxious about something?" Dan says in that annoyingly amused monotone he's capable of and so often indulges in. His hand lifts and tightens a little; Jepha swallows and makes a concerted and almost successful effort not to thrust his throat into the stretched straight curve of skin between Dan's thumb and forefinger, where it fits so well.

He tries, he does try to keep his voice calm and sneering in response but Jepha's a lousy actor and Dan's currently pressing hard on two of his major … what's the word … _erogenous_ zones. Not that his entire fucking body isn't about to fall into that category like, like, like Quinn into a pool. "Sorta worried someone's going to stick something up my ass, Dr Dan."

"MY THIGHS HURT," Quinn announces after some wet and breathy silence from that direction. "My thighs huuuuurt and your elbow is in my face."

"HOW ARE YOU SO CRAPPY AT SEX," Bert declares, and there's a loud splash followed by a bubbling noise.

"Quinn is trying to drown Bert," Dan says conversationally. "If you would consent to undoing your fly, Mr. Howard, we shall see about the insertion of _things_ into your ass."

"Glub," says someone in the pool.

"Fuck," Dan says in an entirely different tone, letting go of Jepha.

Every single nerve ending in Jepha's body tingles an angry protest, but his mouth doesn't form it. That was quite an urgent-sounding _fuck_.

He spins on his heel and makes a dive towards the pool; Quinn's proven a little more successful at attempted murder than underwater frottage.

* * *

The afternoon light is honey-thick and slow between the bent and occasionally broken slats of cheap plastic venetian blinds and the bed sheets are coiled in an indecent embrace with themselves some eight or nine feet away from the actual mattress. They're also somewhat soiled with the remnants of a pack of tortilla chips, chocolate ice-cream, and a very squashed banana.

Quinn squints at the mess, then lets his head drop back to the mattress, the rest of his body dead still. He _may_ be able to move his limbs, but he's not sure he wants to try. He closes his eyes again. The banana smell is an unfriendly invader reaching down his nasal passages and stirring his stomach contents with a whisk. He shakes his head lightly in case that might help.

It doesn't, it mostly just makes him feel like the whisk in his stomach has been replaced by an electric beater in his head. At least he can't fall down further than he already is, he thinks. He loves this mattress with all his heart.

A minute, maybe an hour, maybe thirty seconds later, something spatters warmly on Quinn's cheek, trickles down his face and pools at the corner of his mouth. Quinn grimaces, screws his eyes and mouth more tightly shut, and tosses his head violently to the side so... whatever it is... slides off, slow and wet and vaguely sticky.

Keeping his eyes shut and attempting not to open his mouth either, Quinn mumbles irritably: "What the fuck was that?"

There's a Bert giggle and a stifled sound that could be anyone at all, so long as it's Jepha biting on his own lip to stop from being amused at something he feels a little guilty about. Quinn wonders briefly how much brain space he's lost to the translation of weird-noises-my-band-makes. Factoring in Dan, he's going to say _a shitload_.

No one has actually answered him.

Quinn opens one eye. "I hate you both." Which he realises is even truer than he'd first thought when the first thing he sees is Bert's dick above him. It appears to be staring at him. He closes one eye. Bert laughs, and Quinn turns his head, only to see Jepha standing at his other side, a soft half-smirk on his lips and a cup of tea held loosely in one hand, slightly tilted so a thin stream of green-tinged liquid spills out when he moves his hand a little. He raises his eyebrows at Quinn.

"Fuuuuuuck," Quinn would swipe at the itchy-damp trail along his cheek if he could be bothered moving his limbs. "What the fuuuck?"

"Guessing game! It's called 'what's on my face'," Bert says. Quinn does not tilt his head back to look at him.

"I fucking hate this game," Quinn says.

"You are _ so cute_ when you're mad," Bert replies, sing-song. Quinn turns his head again. Bert's junk jumps in time with his rocking on his heels, evilly cheerful. "Now guess."

It's too early in the afternoon for Quinn to even be awake (when you come home _sans_ one shoe at three a.m., it is a rule that you don't have to rise until at least thee p.m. the next day, unless of course someone finds your other shoe and throws it at you, which means you must rise at whatever moment this happens and attempt to beat said shoe-thrower to death with said shoe), never mind playing guess-the-fluid. "No." He can't tell from the consistency, really, because his face is still kinda numb from the booze, but he's pretty sure no one came on him. "Pee. Or tea."

Jepha smiles like a Buddha, all knowing and irritatingly silent.

Quinn sniffs. He can't smell anything but his own armpit-funk, his arms outstretched at his sides Jesus-pose, and his head lolling onto his own shoulder. It's all last night alcohol coming out through his pores, armpits and... that motherfucking bruised warm banana smell that that makes him cough a little, dangerously close to maybe heaving.

He still can't be bothered attempting to move his heavy-tingling limbs, so he resorts to his last option: he opens his mouth and darts his carpet dry tongue out to lick at the corner of his mouth and taste.

It's probably tea.

Bert having his dick out is like. A red herring. "Fish dick," Quinn says out loud. Bert laughs because obviously he gets it and Jepha continues to smile, but this is his serene smile of _no Quinn, you're not making sense anymore._ Because the thing is, Bert gets his dick out for a lot of reasons, and a good percentage of them are nothing to do with your standard dick-freeing activities. Pissing and coming, mostly, lower on the list is showering, but after that there's a good twenty or thirty reasons Quinn can think of off the top of his head from cock-slapping someone to generally fucking with Quinn's seriously impaired, just awake, kind of hungover mind.

"You're lucky that wasn't piss," Quinn says, smacking his lips and rolling his thick-dry tongue around in his mouth, trying to get the saliva moving.

"Or what, you'll nod me to death?" Bert asks, and leans down to pinch Quinn's cheek. Quinn rolls his eyes so he's looking at Bert and pokes out his tongue. "Gross, it's white." Bert says and attempts to lick Quinn's furry tongue with his own wet pink out.

Quinn growls and shakes his head until Bert gives up and plonks himself on the mattress next to Quinn, jostling him and leaning back against his side. "You smell like off bananas," Bert says.

Quinn doesn't correct him, just reaches his hands up towards Jepha and Jepha hands him his cup. Quinn swishes the luke-warm tea around in his mouth then spits it back in the cup, which he sets down on the floor next to the mattress.

"Hey, your arms work," Jepha says.

So they do.

"There's banana in your hair," Bert says, and runs his fingers through Quinn's thinning crop, then holds the slightly sticky evidence in front of his face.

"Ugh, get that the fuck away from me," Quinn snaps, and shoves Bert's arm. "Is it on the mattress?" Quinn turns his head and gets the banana he's apparently been using as a pillow smeared across his cheek. "FUCK!"

He sits up too fast and sways unsteadily. "What exactly are we going to sleep on now?"

"We could do laundry," Jepha suggests. Quinn stares at Jepha and knows for a fact that Bert is giving him his most potent _are you some kind of dumb bitch or what_ blank stare. Jepha rolls his eyes. "_I_ could do laundry."

"I'll blow you for clean sheets," Quinn offers. He scratches at the bits of banana that have dried solid in his hair and wonders how messed up he looks.

"You guys do know that doing laundry actually only involves taking a bag of dirty stuff down to Steph at the laundromat and then doing whatever the fuck you want for a while until you can pick it up?"

"You do know you're apparently arguing _against_ getting a blowjob?" Quinn asks.

Jepha's face does something extremely strange, some kind of battle of emotions that mostly ends in _despair_. Quinn rubs his eyes and wonders what the fuck.

Quinn loves the unholy fire that sparks in Bert's eyes as Jepha's tenuous resolve visibly crumbles. Bert loves _convincing_ people, the more dubious the idea the better. Quinn's of the opinion that convincing Jepha to come in his mouth is the opposite of dubious (undubious? Indubious?), despite the fact Jepha'll get spanking from Dan or whatever-- which he'll love. It's win-win.

"Jepha, shut your mouth and open your pants. Quinn: open your mouth and enjoy." Bert always knows exactly what they should be doing at any given time.

Quinn sees nothing wrong with this.

Jepha sways on his feet a little, as unsteady as if he's the one half-drunk, half-hungover, while Quinn clings to his belt loops with one sleep tingly hand and fumbles at Jepha's fly with the other. Jepha's arms windmill for a moment then settle like he's walking a tightrope, out by his sides, using them to keep balance for both of them. Quinn sways in and his cheek bumps Jepha's crotch.

"I blow you, I get clean sheets," Quinn reaffirms. He finally gets the button popped on Jepha's jeans and they're tight enough the fly creeps its own way down a little, exposing tattoo and tattoo and finally the sliver of bare skin above his dick. Quinn wills himself still and they stop swaying. He leans in and nips at the skin above Jepha's dick, pretty hard. Jepha hisses in a breath and Quinn licks across the rapidly fading indentations of his teeth, his mouth and tongue wet now.

He bites further down, on top of Jepha's jeans, incessant nips that leave wet patches on the dark denim, and Jepha's hips twitch into his teeth. And when he tugs at Jepha's pants a little he finally has access to the beginnings of an epic hard-on-- you've only got to hint at hurting Jeph and his libido overreacts like an uptight security guard Bert's spit on: hard, fast, hot as hell.

He deliberately doesn't actually start sucking Jepha off straight away, just continues to bite at the skin around his dick, the inside of his thighs, until not Jepha, but Bert (Quinn smiles into Jepha's skin; Bert is infinitely less patient that Jepha), makes a frustrated noise and moves so he's behind Jepha, ducking his arms under Jepha's, which are still held loosely away from his sides.

Bert shoves Jepha's jeans down to his knees and shoots Quinn a look while he's there, a _hurry the fuck up_ look, and tugs sharply on a short lock of Quinn's hair. Quinn's eye stings for a second, but he ignores it. Bert pulls back and wraps his hand around Jepha's dick, holding it from this angle exactly how he'd hold his own (Quinn means exactly, thumb and fingers and the amount of squeeze, he's seen Bert handle his own dick enough).

Jepha hisses when Quinn mouths where his pubic hair _should_ be, then Quinn digs his teeth in, dragging stutter-slow along his skin to the base of his dick, and ignores it when Bert's hand pushes Jepha's dick towards him, the head trailing hard and damp over Quinn's cheek and Quinn's three day stubble.

Jepha's knees give out slowly enough. When they hit the ground, gracefully enough, Quinn barely gets kneed in the chin, and his face ends up roughly where it should be: still in Jepha's lap. Bert growls impatiently and lowers himself down after them with the sound of his fly coming down too, a pornographic noise rather than a kind of hilarious one when it's backed up by Jepha's loud breathing: desperate, quick, and it'd taken almost nothing to get him there, either.

Quinn starting to maybe see the appeal of this orgasm denial thing: Jepha is wound up tight and hot, ready to go the second someone sinks teeth into him, more than normal, tense and willing rather than relaxed and willing, and Quinn's dick gets harder when he bites down and Jepha makes a noise like he's going to come just from this: _desperate_ and almost painful sounding.

Bert hand grabs at Quinn's hand and yanks it over to himself, to his open fly, and Quinn loses balance, falls kind of choking fast onto Jepha's dick, his throat closing, his eyes watering, his one hand on Jepha the only thing keeping him from planting all his weight on Jepha's legs and actually choking.

He wraps his fingers blindly around Bert's dick and strokes uncomplicated, the only rhythm he can manage-- the only thing that could make this better is if someone would fuck him. Quinn sucks sloppy-hard and swallows a groan. Dan. Dan who is hung like a porn star, huge and thick inside him-- Quinn feels himself lose rhythm as his one free hand twitches against Jepha's skin with the urge to jerk himself off--

"Ow," Bert says suddenly, his hand clenching hard and fingernails digging into Quinn's wrist, "ow, cut that the fuck oooooout _ow ow_ that is not sexy ow. STOP IT."

No one's exactly rushing to examine the source of his discomfort or even really paying attention to it; Jepha's got that slack-jawed porn-face on, the one that's normally stupid fucking sexy hot 'cause Quinn can tell exactly how turned on he must be and empathy was always his strong point, yeah, and Quinn has his mouth full regardless and _is also the fucking problem_.

"FUCKING STOP THAT." Bert smacks him in the side of the head.

Bert yanks Quinn's wrist, pulling Quinn's blindly groping hand away from his balls.

"Mmmph," Quinn says, then resettles his hand easily on Jepha's thigh.

"No shit, asshole," Bert snaps. "I think you waxed my fucking nutsack with your fingernails, you freak." Bert yanks the fine blonde hair at the small of Quinn's back with his fingernails. Quinn's closed eyes snap open watering and he scrapes his teeth up Jepha's dick, stopping himself half a wince from seriously biting down. Jepha's blind and flush-cheeked, and apparently fuck-deaf to Bert's complaints. Instead of jerking away from Quinn's sharp-toothed wince, he shoves up hard like Quinn did it on purpose, and Quinn pulls up a little so he doesn't choke, feels the tickle of almost-gagging in the back of his throat when Jepha's jewellery hits his throat briefly. With his eyes open Quinn can see the crunch of stomach muscles and ink, and thinks Jepha's close.

Bert's disappeared, or at least has lost interest in yanking Quinn's shockingly painful short hairs, which is enough for Quinn at this point, because he's _a bit busy_. Quinn sucks and hears an explosion of white noise and a loud "motherfuckkkshit!" He can't smell burning (because all he can smell is dick), so everything must be okay. The fact is that even if the house caught on fire and the pieces of banana clinging to everything in the room started dancing the can-can, he'd have no fucking idea, as all he can smell is dick and all he can feel is dick, his own where it's rubbing _not enough_ against the low riding waistband of his jeans and Jepha's where it's pushing _nearly too much_ against the roof of his mouth.

Jepha's colourful stomach is very close to Quinn's face, and when he briefly opens his eyes, he gets a flash of tense fluttering stomach muscles under his inky skin.

"Whoa." Dan voice comes out of nowhere; Quinn hadn't heard him moving. Quinn grinds his crotch against the floor and hopes that's answer enough. "Bert just gave me the angriest high-five ever."

"Pube-- yank--" Jepha pants out.

"I can't tell if that's an answer or a request. Anyway, I _can_ tell that Jeph is not allowed too much excitement right now, and for soooome reason, he's breaking Dr. Dan's orders."

Quinn barely registers that Dan's still talking, until he feels a big, callused palm flat on his lower back, fingers brushing the crack of his ass where his pants are half shoved down. Quinn keeps sucking and attempts to ignore the shiver that rubs up his spine as Dan's fingers dip lower and tug at his waist band. Even when Dan's fingers hook Quinn's empty belt loops and wiggle-yank his pants down, hard and fast, taking Quinn's underwear with them.

And the thing is. Quinn maybe has a thing about his ass. So when Dan spreads him wide and slips two mysteriously lubed fingers into his ass with no preamble and no warning, Quinn starts paying attention to what exactly Dan's doing. His fingers are thick and lube soaked, like a rough tongue, pushing inexorably in, in, in. They're rough and too fast and Quinn feels instantly overfull, stretched wide.

Quinn's mind says _too much_, but his mouth says, "More," and both agree on the drawn out "fuck, yeah," as Dan makes no move to pause and just moves.

His back arches and he loses his rhythm. Jepha's dick slips out of his slack mouth with his choppy, shocked groan and a string of drool. His dick rubs kind of painful raw on the carpet and he has no choice but to lift his hips, pushing his ass back into Dan's hand as a consequence, to get his hand on himself, he's quite suddenly almost, almost going to come-- if Dan would just move.

His lips and chin feel cold when he breathes out a guttery uuugh, pushing back into Dan's fingers, getting them that little bit deeper.

Dan's hand shifts where it's curled around Quinn's hip, and his long fingers brush Quinn's where he's squeezing his own dick. Dan's other hand moves, drags slippery fingers in-out of Quinn's ass, a slow, apparently aimless fucking movement.

His fingers still feel too big in Quinn's ass, still. Quinn groans, a breathy, unexpected, embarrassing kind of noise he hadn't known was coming until it was hanging in the air. "More," he says, again.

Dan says nothing, and pushes a third finger in alongside the first too, and oceans of slick skin-warm lube notwithstanding, Quinn is still shocked tight and clenching hot, still just on the cusp of feeling comfortable with the two thick blunt fingers already inside him, and Dan just pushes a third right in, not slow, not fast, just _in, in, in_ like it's got nowhere else to go but into Quinn's overly sensitive ass.

Quinn can feel every uneven, rough ridge of Dan's finger-pads and knuckles like tiny jolts up his spine. "Really," Dan says, maybe asks, low, low voiced.

"More," Quinn says, and then wonders if that's not a _bad_ idea. Then moves his hand over his own dick in time with Dan's fingers and ceases to care.

"Something about ass you'd like to share with the class, Quinn? Ass, class, ass, class assss classss." Dan hums and talks in time with his fingers, his voice jumping up an octave into silly voiced mockery. "DON'T."

Quinn's eyes snap open and his hand slows, but is too far gone to _stop_, on his dick, and he opens his eyes to the sight on Jepha's hand, inky fingered, holding his dick half an inch from Quinn's lower lip. Quinn glances up at Jepha's face, but Jepha's eyes aren't on the prize, he's gazing darkly at Dan, his mouth slack and his hand frozen on his dick.

Quinn leans forward and touches his bottom lip to the underside of Jepha's dick, leans up and flicks his tongue against the glint of metal at the head briefly.

"No, Jepharee. Bad." Dan's voice comes from far away.

Jepha's dick twitches, Quinn swears he can see his pulse speed up through the flushes dark skin. Quinn moves to lean forward again, ignoring Dan, but Quinn's lips gape open, shut like he can't breathe because _he can't_ as Dan crooks his fingers, and pushes them in until he hits Quinn's prostate and Quinn can't breathe for a second, all full up so he can't even fit air in.

Jepha says something above him and through his pulse beating against his eardrums, Quinn hears Bert yell from the other room.

"THE TV WON'T WORK," Bert yells.

Then yells again.

Then screams.

"Shut the fuck up," sticks in Quinn's throat and comes out more like "oh fucking fuuuu-uck."

"Turn it to the left, Bert," Dan calls calmly as if he isn't breaking Quinn apart from his ass outwards.

"Fuck you, it doesn't wooooork," Bert whines loudly.

"It does, you've got to fiddle with the thing at the back!" Dan shouts back.

This conversation is having a weird effect on Quinn's mental images, given Dan is currently fiddling with things at the back of him, but he's almost too close to care. Almost. Almost.

"If you don't shut up," Quinn grits out, the power of his irritation overriding his desire to do nothing but squirm and groan and push back, "I'm going to FUCK YOU WITH A RAKE." _Rake_ comes out breathy and Dan's laughs like an audible smirk behind him.

"FUUUUUUUUUUCK THIS," Bert yells, and there's an ominous silence.

Quinn squeezes his eyes shut. Dan's fingers have stilled in his ass and his hand has stilled on his dick. He sort of wants to buck back and get himself moving up and down Dan's fucking hands on his own, and he doesn't even fucking care if that makes him as bad as Jepha, not right now.

"FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK." Something bangs in the other room.

Quinn turns his head and looks at Dan. Impatient, and ever so slightly wary.

Dan looks at him.

"Don't you fucking dare," Quinn snaps. "Dan. Fucker. Cunt."

Dan shrugs and pulls his fingers from Quinn's ass, leaving him feeling empty and gaping and _wrong_ and falling slowly away from the shining light of a really intense orgasm like a soul slamming back into its body after the defribulator starts its heart again.

"I'll come back," Dan's voice drifts away, sounding utterly unconvincing. "Do you want the TV broken?"

"Do you think I _care_?" Quinn spits, then opens his eyes and realises that Jepha's gone, too, at some point. He's pretty much alone in the room now, his ass open and his thighs shaking. "Cunt," Quinn states, loudly. "Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, CUNT." His flagging erection dies a sad, lonely, pissed off death.

* * *

_We have no idea how we got here but by god we're going to drink_.

The bar is not exactly heaving. In a larger city this place would be deemed deader than an aborted foetus, but in Norfolk, Nebraska, the small scattering of bodies probably counts as a busy night. Afternoon. Whatever.

There is a bowl of nuts on the bar with a small sticker attached: "Not suitable for minors."

The bar doesn't look suitable for anyone except alcoholics, the functionally brain-damaged, and touring musicians; it's long and low-ceilinged and has a hint of industrial or business park about it. The barman, of which there is only one, is wearing a plaid shirt and a bored expression as he watches reruns of _Gilligan's Island_ on what was billed as but is most assuredly _not_ a Big Screen Cable TV. The beer light is broken, the skylight is half-open, and the whole place smells of despair and imminent zombie invasion.

Dan orders eight beers; Bert leans around him and orders eight tequila shooters before asking, "Why _eight_?" as if basic math is beyond him.

The words _can I see some ID?_ flirt visibly with the barman's mouth but he wisely rejects them in favour of, "You want to pay cash or keep a tab?"

"We want a tab," Quinn calls, already hunkered down into a cushionless corner booth with a look of determination. He's going to enjoy himself come what fucking may; Jepha, however, dithers in mid-step and corrects him:

"No we don't. Bert, we don't want a – "

"Yes we do," Bert tells the barman. "Ignore Mr Sandy Vagina. Jephar_ee_, baby, gimme your card."

"No. What happened to yours?" Jepha's hand strays to his wallet all the same, like a drunk driver to the central divider. Instinct and alcohol cut a heady road of bad choices and future debts.

"I snapped it." Bert holds out his hand. "Quinn locked me outta the bus. Gimme card." He's drumming his fingers on Dan's bicep unconsciously; he doesn't notice, but the barman's staring and so are some of the drinkers. "Oh," Bert adds, proudly, "this is my drummer. You can have him for feef-ty dollah and a Reese's piece."

"Rates went up, it's two Reese's pieces now," Dan says, grabbing bottles and locking his fingers around their necks.

"Fucking inflation. Jeph_a_. Gimme your –" Bert stops as Jepha shoves his Visa into Bert's mouth and scoops up three of the shooters. Bert extracts the card – there is a cute bear in a boy costume painted on it, and waves it at the increasingly worried-looking barman. "—Tab!"

"You want a tray for all that?" the barman suggests, wiping Bert's drool off the card on his sleeve.

"Do you have dwarves to carry them?" Bert asks, tapping his fingers on the bar instead as Dan sweeps up the remaining beer in the crook of his arm and looks expectantly at Bert, waiting.

"… Um, _no_." The barman gives Bert the same look a lot of people do on their first encounter: _what the fuck is this freak and how do I get away?_ "No, sir. We have no dwarves."

"No, sir," Bert mimics. "Okay, a tray. A tray, a traaaaay."

"Why are you taking so long why am I waiting waiting waiting," Quinn calls, banging on the table. "I'm gonna divorce your ass."

"Just his ass?" Jepha dumps three shooters on the table and bounces back to pick up the rest. "You're still going to stay married to his mouth? After all those words? Quinn, you're a beaten wife. Don't take that—"

Bert kicks him in the ass. Jepha just about moves out of the way fast enough, and Dan spins on his foot and dumps beers onto the table with all the grace of a falling rock.

"—foamhands!" He wipes the beer-jizz on Bert as he passes, scooping up the remaining beers.

"… Y'didn't want the tray?" the bemused barman asks as Bert throws himself down next to Quinn and immediately makes a pained noise when the seat refuses to bounce.

_An unspecified number of hours later:_

…of course the problem with tequila is that it multiplies. One tequila becomes eight tequilas real fast and then beer gets all uppity and wants to get in on the action and then you have to drink four fucking quick so it doesn't get offended, and at some point you're going to get beer over your head and tequila down your shirt and then someone tries to lick beer out of your ear and that's usually a sign the evening's gonna go down hill into the territory known as "messy" and "blackout".

At least, that's usually Quinn's experience.

He's balancing a beer bottle on his head when Jepha, who is slumped without grace over the table and surrounded by shot glasses like teeny little sticky see-through tequila soldiers, raises an important if slightly blurry point:

"Who's driving?"

Quinn points unsteadily at Bert.

Bert downs another shot, wide-eyed, and shakes his head, then retches. When he's done making cat puke sounds under the table he jerks his thumb at Dan, who spits out his beer in alarm and waves phone fingers at the bartender.

"Taaaaaaaxi," Jepha says with apparent gratitude. "Taxi is driving."

It takes its sweet time arriving, long enough for Quinn to make friends with two more beers, a shooter, and Dan's neck, while Bert tries and fails to explain satisfactorily to anyone who is listening (a group of people which contains, at last count, no one) what the fuck they are doing in Nebraska.

Quinn gets as far as "support" before losing interest and concentration. His hand is mysteriously warm: after a minute he realises that's because it's on the back of Dan's neck. The reason he has a damp crotch to go with his warm hand is he's just knocked the dregs of his most recent beer off his head and into his lap. It doesn't explain why his elbow's numb but Quinn's not in search of answers, just … something something. Soooomething. In truth he's not sure. More beer sounds like a good idea.

Normally, when more beer seems like an excellent plan it's a sign it's a very bad idea, but Quinn has yet to pay attention to that particular life lesson.

Bert flicks a lime at him.

The soggy slice sticks to Quinn's shirt for a lengthy second, and he watches it drop to the already alcoholic mess of his lap. "Cocktail," he snickers, because beer plus fruit plus dick is a fucking joke.

"Five a day," Dan exclaims, grabbing for the lime.

"You'll go blind," Bert flicks a lime at Jepha; it hits him in the face and Jepha doesn't flinch a single inch.

Quinn slams Dan's hand flat over his groin. _That's_ what he wants, goddamn. Someone to jerk him off. When he looks up to see what Bert's going to do about it, Bert's not there to see.

He is instead dancing aimlessly in the middle of the bar to some fucking awful pop song that sounds to Quinn's expert and not at all judgmental ear like a whore being hit with a fuckhead to the tune of cat-sex, and pulling shit-eating faces at Jepha. Jepha, meanwhile, is trying to keep up. Since he's fucking drunk, can actually dance properly unlike Bert, and is giggling like something's broken in his head, it isn't … quite working.

Something falls off the table and Quinn hits his foot on something else. Blurry, blurry bar.

He leans into Dan. He doesn't recall standing up, but here he is in a dark corner of a bar in Nefuckingbraska drooping onto Dan's shoulder as Dan fumbles with the fly on his pants. There was probably a conversation about this and, if Quinn knows himself at all, his side of it probably amounted to "fuck yeah".

It's probably safe to say he's drunk.

He's also pretty fucking horny; there's hot body weight against his, half-propping him up, someone's hand – probably Dan's but it could be King fucking Kong for all Quinn knows, it's fucking big enough – fucking around his dick, and he's full of beer, which is kind of the beginning of most of Quinn's sexytimes anyhow. Beer and bongs and Bert and occasionally blackmail.

_Bert_ is now pretending to grind against Jepha with bandy legs, Quinn can see the stupid asshole over Dan's shoulder, and Jepha keeps doubling up with laughter and ruining it.

He catches an angry look from the bartender but his attention's easily … divertulated … right now, and it _diverticates_ back to his crotch fucking fast when Dan slides Quinn's dick out into his palm. Dark corner, increasingly crowded bar, no one is paying attention. Fuck them if they are; Quinn's face is hot with shots and his cock is … uh … something that rhymes, he'll ask Bert later. Point. Pointy? The _point_ is, Dan's   
beer-damp hand is shaking hands with Quinn's manhood and Quinn's got enough presence of mind to just lean into the wall, shut his eyes, and enjoy instead of grabbing Dan's face and kissing him.

He totally would do this, though Dan usually makes a face about Quinn's half-beard or quarter beard or however much beard he's got to at that stage and then claims he misses the pornotache.

He rubs his lips together, dry and beer-spit-flavoured, while Dan gets into a stride that fucking burns him like crazy: a little too rough, a little too tight, just the wrong speed to get him just _off_; Quinn's on the verge of saying something when he opens his eyes first, and gets a faceful of Bert and Jepha making out in the space between the booth and the bar.

They're messy-drunk and really into it, Bert's hands as ever locked behind Jepha's neck, Jepha's crawling like slow … like retarded kids … between Bert's hips and his shoulders, both of them slumped at that angle that lets you stand and hump in one; Quinn's used it a lot.

First off he's just hot for it, Jepha's body pushing against Bert's, their mouths locked, and Dan must be too because he picks up the pace with his wrist like he's working his own dick (his poor dick, his poor dick must have fucking calluses on it). Quinn, or more accurately Quinn's many, many beers and more shooters, forget that they are in a bar in Nebraska which looks about as fag-friendly as a marine base.

There won't be any point explaining that Bert's not gay, he just likes making out with guys a whole lot, or that Quinn's dick in Dan's hand is more bro-bonding than homogay…sexuality …stuff… these guys here aren't going to appreciate such motherfucking subtleties.

He'd say something, but there's this sneeze building in his balls and fuck it. Semi-rural Nebraska is probably fucking totally liberal and tolerant and he likes Dan's hand where it is. Quinn slumps into Dan's fist and drapes his face over his shoulder with a mutter of encouragement. Something like, "Yeeaaah," because original thought and handjobs aren't exactly fucking pinky-swear buddies. Because of the, the, the fingers.

He's not even making sense to himself now.

"Yeah," Quinn repeats, to make sure Dan knows.

"Uh-huh," Dan agrees.

"Get the fuck out of my bar, faggots," says someone who isn't the bartender – Quinn squints over Dan's shoulder – but looks like he could fight a house and win. It's a compelling argument for getting the fuck out of the bar, but Quinn's beer forgets that he's not a ninja sometimes.

The house-wrestling dude in the Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt isn't talking to him but to Bert and Jepha, the fucking main attraction. The make-out champions in the glare of the bar lights who are drawing all the attention in the _world_ on themselves, because one of them is Bert and that's how he rolls. Bert's beer also occasionally forgets he's not a ninja, and Quinn winces in anticipation:

"Only if you gimme kisses," Bert says, tapping his lips with one finger and crazy-grinning up at the guy, his hips still plastered against Jepha's. Quinn can't see Jepha's expression but he looks drunk enough he's probably just smiling that stupid smile he has when he has no idea what the fuck's going on.

"Oh shit," Dan says quietly. He sounds sober…rer…erer than Quinn currently feels and his hand is gone from Quinn's dick like it was never there. No matter how drunk he is, Quinn knows better than to wander around a bar with his dick out.

… mostly.

He tucks himself in. Bert is still smirking drunk-assed up at the guy with the stains on his shirt and there's the rumbling of a fight hanging in the air like, uh, smoke or a storm or some shit.

Jepha hiccups into Bert's shoulder, leaning on him.

Dan lurches away from Quinn, moving like a fucking, a panther or some shit, if panthers walk like the floor is sticky and moving, like they're on a ship … made of … tar … Quinn's not sure his similes improve when he's drunk but they do get more exciting. Like everything else. He gropes at the wall and mumbles at his erection to fuck off.

The bar's gone very quiet right now, except that shitty pop song which has been replaced by another shitty pop song which is almost identical except now the whore appears to be being hit with another whore. He's heard silences like this called "an angel passing" but Quinn's kind of sure this is more "world waiting for inevitable smackdown" than an overhead divine fuck in a white dress.

Into the apparently endless silence the bartender yells, "YOUR TAXI'S HERE."

"Wha' bou' my card?" Jepha asks pitifully as Dan tries to herd him and Bert out of the door without going near the huge dude. It's like watching a, a, a dog hassling ducklings. Drunk ducklings who are intent on starting a fight.

Quinn marches determinedly across a floor which seems just as determined that it won't stay on one level, and spins Bert around to face the door; the bartender throws Jepha's card at him … snapped into two pieces.

"Out."

"Fucking … fuck," Quinn's beer complains as Bert stumbles backwards out of the bar and a bottle explodes on the floor by his foot. "Fucking _fuckers_." It's not like he was pissing on the table or anything, fuck.

The "taxi" is a pick-up truck.

Quinn does not have a good feeling about this.

He continues to have a bad feeling about this until the shotgun door bangs open and the face of a tiny old Chinese lady peers out at them. "You owe me next time you pass through, and you don't drink there again," she says flatly. "You stupid fucks. That place is full of dicks."

_Some hours later…_

"Tis a testament to your alcoholicolicment that you are letting me do this." Dan points the camera at Quinn's face and Quinn just beams woozily and concentrates on staying on the can. His boxers are pooled around his ankles and his smile is the slippery, unfocussed smile of a man who has become incredibly good friends with Mr Tequila in recent hours.

"Thou art," Quinn says cheerfully, folding toilet paper into a wadge in his hands. He screws up his face. "Thou art. Thou ist. Ista. Est. Stoooop taking photos of me shitting, you freak."

"Poop for the camera, Quinnughree," Dan says, leaning on the wall. "Poooopoooopooop. The public have the right to know you're human."

"How are you words forming mouth," Quinn's smile is currently blooming independently of his mind, "beer mouth tequila mouth words ouch."

"Mouth form words Dan mind superior puny human Quinn mind." Dan takes another photo and giggles under his breath. "Also, less tequilalalaladumdumdum_bam_."

_Bam_, the en suite door echoes, and Dan jumps out of the way, dropping the camera onto the empty shelf by his head. Bert lurches into the tiny room, points a pair of unsteady middle fingers at Quinn like he's trying to shoot him in the face with a nail infection, and he barks, "QUINN MOVE MOVE QUINN MOVE."

Quinn squints happily up from the toilet and gives him an unequally unsteady bird, his head lolling gracelessly to one side. "Fuck … off?"

"Fucking … warned you," Bert complains. He appears to be suffering from a roughly similar paralysis of sense. "Nerggh. Fuckdamn your face." He pulls the shower curtain out of the bath and back away into the little room, almost doubled-over. "ARGH."

The bath is not empty.

"Nrm." Jepha makes a vague movement with his arm that might or might not be an attempt to shield his eyes from the light but which doesn't get much further than a slight tensing of his bicep and a groan. He looks, if anything, even more invertebrate-inebriated than Quinn, and his t-shirt is rucked up into his armpits. "Nrm. Mrh. Ggnn."

Bert's slithery-footed pirouette almost looks like real dancing and the look on his face is real desperation. He punches Quinn in the upper arm. "SPREAD THEM."

"Whu?"

"LEGS." Bert scrabbles impatiently at Quinn's knees as Dan's laugh rolls around the bathroom and Quinn stares at him in bewildered, alcoholic myopia. After a second Quinn's clamped-closed thighs drool open, Bert jerks at the waist and shoves his head between them—

"I'm _pooping_," Quinn says with wounded dignity. Dan laughs harder.

There's a _hyrrruccckulch_ noise and Bert's back bunches up; a second later something wet-sounding hits the porcelain.

"OH YOU ARE FUCKING KIDDING ME—" Quinn smacks Bert in the back of his head, knocking him back off the toilet.

Bert's lips glisten with stomach bile as he falls back on his haunches; Quinn flails indignantly at his ass with the toilet paper, staggers to his feet while yanking at his pants (and forgetting entirely to include his boxers in this mad rush for decency), and skids, skids on the tiles.

"—FUCK," Quinn adds, shoving Bert onto his back as he goes down, narrowly avoiding cracking his head on the toilet bowl. "You fucking, you fuck. You. Fucking fuck!"

Bert digs his knees into Quinn's flank and squirms, succeeding not in getting the fuck out from under his guitarist's body weight or even in getting into a less uncomfortable sprawl, but only in pulling Quinn's pants down with his feet.

"GET YOUR BALLS OFF ME," Bert shrieks, kicking and fortunately only hitting Quinn in the thigh.

"GET YOUR PUKE OFF MY DICK," Quinn retorts, rolling around and discovering quite quickly that of all the things it is possible to do while scrambling around a bathroom floor with Bert clinging to him and biting his shoulder, _pulling his pants up_ is not on the necessarily short list.

Dan's laugh shades from "amused" into "borderline hysterical" and he slides down the wall on his back, ending in a ball-shaped vibrating lump of hilarity as he hugs his own knees. "Ahaha. Hoo. Ahaa. Waaaagh. _Stop it_."

There's a reverberating _wuhthonk_ as Quinn tries to kick Bert, fails, and stubs his toe on the side of the bath. "OW. Ow. Owwww owowwow you _bitch_."

Dan twists around and shuffles until his back's to the bath – he couldn't have said why himself, not least because "why" was currently more letters than a mouth engaged with vowels could cope with – and bangs his head on the ledge. Once, twice. "Ahahaha HAHAAHahaha _please stop now_ hwheheeeeheee ow … hahaha," he adds for good measure, "I'M SERIOUSLY GOING PE-E-E-EHAHAHAHAAhahahaa."

Something like a scribbled-on tentacle flops over the side of the bath and hits him gently in the head. Dan nearly leaps out of his skin, but it turns out it's a hand. Jepha's hand, accompanied by a very aimless giggle; the laughter of someone who is still lucid enough to recognise that there _is_ laughter but who may well be far too shitfaced to know _why_ people are laughing. It feels nice on his head. The hand. Also the laugh.

Jepha's hand starts a slow and clumsy mussing of Dan's hair and, as his curled-up fingers knuckle pleasantly on his scalp, Bert's shrieking laughter and Quinn's wounded yells begin to fade into wet sounds.

At first Dan just assumes he's passing out, but squinting confirms that, actually, Bert's just locked his legs around Quinn's hips and is kissing him with the puke-mouthed determination of a drunk limpet and that Quinn's known Bert for long enough not to bother fighting at this point.

The hand on his head continues to rub soft and in the wrong direction until the room stops spinning and the world becomes a little less painful in the region of Dan's laugh-fucked gut.

Dan stretches up from his slump and pokes his head over the edge of the bath, his chin on the ledge, right next to Jepha's wrist. "Rawr."

"Hi," Jepha suggests, waving weakly with the hand he's just done mussing with. He looks like he was poured into the bath out of some … jug full of drunk, tattooed prettyboys in the sky.

Dan hooks an elbow over the edge of the bath, next to his chin, and returns the liquid smile with one of his own. "Watcha doin', rubber ducky?" It's a bad Ernie impression but it's good enough to make Jepha flap his hand helplessly in the air and giggle again.

"Quack."

"Quackquack?"

"Waddlewaddlequack." Jepha flaps his hand again. "MMmmm_quack_ahaha."

"Oh really?" Dan hooks his other elbow over the edge of the bath; there's a slurp from the floor, a giggle, and a thump. He strains, trying to lift his entire body weight on his elbows and chin.

"You fucking dick," Quinn whispers affectionately.

Whether it's aimed at him, or Bert, or the world at large, Dan neither knows nor cares. He digs his toes into the tiles, heaves, and launches himself over the edge of the bath like half-digested beer out of Bert's throat. He slides like bony Jello down the incline and collapses in a heap on top of the warm and welcoming cushion of half-conscious Jepha.

There's a muffled sound. Dan squirms and tries to find a bit of Jepha that isn't stupidly bony.

"Ow," Jepha says quite clearly, right in Dan's ear, "ow ow ow ow your knee is in my balls, mothercunting--"

Dan shifts again until his knee is still just about jabbing into Jepha's balls. He puts his eyebrows to Jepha's – directly and perfectly matched, taking good time to line them up evenly, because that's important, to have perfectly level eyebrows when you're kneeing someone in the nutsack - and looks into Jepha eyes. After a second he manages to actually focus on Jepha's … baby … browns … and murmurs, "Youuuuuuuuuuuuu liiiike it."

Pushing his leg into Jepha's crotch all the while, harder, and harder. He can feel Jepha's squashy squashy manparts right up against his knee, his thigh. He can also feel pretty much every bony part of Jepha's stupid skinny body in all _his_ tenderest parts, which is really not how it's supposed to go, damn it. _He's_ not the, the, the fucking painwhore. Masochist.

"Fff--f-f-fuuuuuuuuuck---ing cunt," Jepha hisses. The objection is slightly undermined by his groan, which escapes right after and sounds a little bit like porn. A lot like porn, as his head slips and hits the bathtub.

Dan's bracing himself just (really _just_) enough so Jepha's still able to breathe (at least a little, it's not going to hurt at all if Jepha's a little short of breath. It's not going to hurt if it _hurts_. Dan chuckles into Jepha's mouth, lip bumping over a snakebite as Jepha moves his head and Dan's too busy thinking to keep up (a little drunk, too, a little, a little).

He chases Jepha's lips and pins him with a kiss, open mouthed and getting a metal studded tongue against his own (always makes him think of how that little metal bump feels against the head of his dick), slick and wet and desperate already, sloppy like Jepha usually only is when he's really turned on, when he's really so wound up he's drunker on it than you can get on alcohol. Wide open mouthed and wet, obscene kisses, endlessly wanting more more more, ready to swallow whatever Dan gives him. Anything. Anything at all.

Dan's been pushing, slowly, to see how far he can go with Jepha, slowly, slowly, and this week has been an impressive, hilarious, _ball aching_ example of Jepha giving more the more Dan pushes. Jepha is plasticine.

Jepha is plasticine with bones in. Especially now, moulded perfectly against the inside of the bathtub, limbs loose, and fitting under Dan—well, kind of awkwardly, but still perfect, perfectly awkward. Dan shifts his knee against Jepha's crotch, feels his balls shift, and presses until he knows it's got to be uncomfortable again, until he'd be wincing imagining the feel of it, if he weren't too busy watching the change in Jepha's face, the way he goes tense from the edges of his lips outwards, shoulders, arms, muscles.

He is plasticine and Dan loves moulding him into the shapes he wants-- Jepha goes from loose limbed to tense, his hips hitch off the bathtub floor, towards the pressure from Dan's knee and Dan--

"WAIT, WAIT. WAIT!" Dan's half shut eyes open and he looks down at Jepha's mouth, but he's not saying anything, he's just breathing hot over damp lips, his eyes shut.

Oh, right.

The bathroom door slams open again, and Quinn stumbles in, his pants trailing like he's an escaped convict from some kind of pantsless chain gang, _clink clink clink_ on the tiles, and he throws a handful of paper into the toilet, then shakes his hand in the air and glares for a moment, before sighing and turning to switch the bathroom tap on. Pissed off because he has to wash his hands.

Dan laughs and lets his head drop to lean against Jepha's again, the chuckling in his chest bump-bumping their skulls together gently like when you sleep against the window of a bus. Jepha lets out a huff of air against Dan's mouth as Dan's knee against his crotch shifts accidentally, a hitching, soft, pain-arousal sound that Dan can never resist wanting to lick off Jepha's lips.

"I THREW UP ON YOUR PILLOW," Bert yells from the bedroom.

Jepha groans against Dan's lips in a distinctly non-sexy way.

"WHOSE PILLOW?" Quinn yells.

"Indoor voice, you bastards," Jepha huffs against Dan's mouth.

Dan gropes down to Jepha's crotch just to hear him trail off breathily, shut him up, but as he shifts he loses balance and ends up faceplanting in Jepha's chest, they both _oof_ at the same time and Dan's sneakers (which are damp, because the shower head is _drip drip dripping_ onto the material, slowly soaking through to his socks).

"I am too old for bath sex," Jepha says. "Too old and drunk and drunk."

"And drunk," Dan agrees, and attempts to prise himself out of the bath, but finds he's slightly stuck. Jepha's hand is around his forearm and his other finger-walking down his back, pulling up his shirt slowly in an attempt to get a hand on Dan's ass.

"I thought you were too ooooooold," Dan says.

"Fuck you," Jepha says. His fingers are bath-tile cold on Dan's back, colder as they slip under the waistband of his jeans. He's an intriguing combination of genuinely pissy and breathy-horny sounding.

"Nope," Dan says, and watches the colour flood Jepha's cheeks, on top of the tipsy tequila flush that's already painting them. He knows Dan's not going to let him get off, but it seems he can't stop asking, even when he doesn't do it in words. "Let me up," Dan asks, cheerfully: Jepha's all wound up and his hard dick is digging into Dan's thigh, Dan can't be anything but cheerful. Cheerful and horny.

Jepha winds his fingers into the belt loops on Dan's jeans and growls, his teeth bared and his labret posts sticking out long and wonky.

"Let gooooo," Dan says, and pushes his knee into Jepha's crotch harder. Jepha expression falters, flutters, and his fingers loosen on Dan's pants. Dan kneels unsteadily above him and looks down. He contemplates the view, for a long moment. "You look good down there, you know," and he does, Jepha looks good with his jeans riding low and his shirt pushed up so there's a thick strip of colourful skin on show, his eyeliner smudged into the bags under his eyes.

Jepha just stares up at him, boozily.

"You like a sex crime victim ready to be dissolved in a bath of acid," Dan says thoughtfully. Jepha does, his eyes half-lidded, looking like he's already _been_ fucked hard. Dark and dirty against the white of the tub. Jepha's hand twitches and creeps towards his own crotch, but Dan grasps his wrist, pulls his hand and sets his palm flat against the side of the bath.

It stays there. Dan presses Jepha's other hand against the other side of the tub. It stays there, too. Plasticine.

Dan is. He's going to come on Jepha's pretty, wrecked, fucking face.

Bert stumbles in loudly, making Dan's heart thump and Jepha's hands move. He _had_ tuned out the Bert-and-Quinn show (a clusterfuck of a sitcom that can bring the most hardy of audiences to their knees), but now Bert is sick again, puke splashing in the toilet, loud and sympathy gag-inducing.

"Unless you're coming in here to come on Jepha, get the fuck out, Bert," Dan closes his eyes for Bert's predictable retaliation, a slap, a tug at his hair, rubbing spitty-pukey fingers down Dan's neck, or worst option of all, a pout so soul wrenching Dan'll forgo his orgasm to make him smile again. Dan can't keep quiet, though, because he is a man with a plan now and he's enjoying the view enough not to want an interruption. Doubly an interruption with vomit.

"I'm not coming on anyone," Bert says, and sounds distinctly queasy, still.

"YOU THREW UP AFTER SUCKING MY DICK?" Quinn sounds kind of _sad_, and extremely offended.

"HELL NO," Bert says, and slams his way out, falling shoulder-first into the door before he makes it out again. Dan is thankful, infinitely, for their apparently endless ability to distract each other from the outside world. "I don't throw up after eating your Mum's skanky ass stanky ass fuckin--" his voice trails out of the room, a softly fading torrent of filth.

Kneeling up in the bath his knees are almost aching and his skin feels damp from the cold, the only warm spots coming from where Jepha's thighs are pressed against his legs. His dick is so hard he can feel his pulse against the fly of his jeans. Some _might_ say that Dan's own bet bites him in the ass somewhat-- and not even in the sexy-sexy ass-biting way.

It's a bad idea to fuck Jepha this week since he's not sure exactly how much control over the situation he can keep when he's balls deep in Jepha with his fingers pushing down on his pulse, but there are other ways to skin a cat. Or bust a nut on a bassist, if you will.

"Just because you can't come, doesn't mean I can't," he says, in case he hasn't made this adequately clear by how he's been merrily getting off in front, around, and on Jepha all week, as often as possible. Best feedback loops of frustrated horniness ever. It's just he likes saying it out loud, too, because it winds Jepha up even more.

He glances away from Jepha, and it hard, it's hard, mostly because _he's hard_, and the contemplative frown on his face, like he's a little too drunk to catch Dan's drift yet.

"Meerkat!" Jepha says, finally, like he's just solved a really intense problem.

Dan pauses for a second before he realises what the fuck Jepha's on about—then squeaks back at him though a laugh, and raises his hands to his chest like a begging dog. He chirp-chatters like a squirrel, or a fucking... mongoose or something. Mongoose, meerkat. Probably sound the same.

He glances right and catches his dishevelled, frizzy-haired reflection in the mirror, his hat is drifting sideways, dangerously close to parody of a kid that was really cool in the early 90s. There are spots of high colour on his cheeks, alcohol and sex. He curls his top lip and makes a toothy meerkat threat at his reflection, suspicious like the dogs sometimes are of their own image when they see it. He looks back at Jepha, sure as hell preferable to watching himself looking fuck-stupid in the mirror.

He climbs out of the bath without Jepha grabbing at him, this time.

"You did hear what I said, right?" He flicks the top button of his jeans undone as emphasis. Jepha's eyes follow his fingers and his tongue traces his lips as Dan's dip below his waistband. He's listening.

"I'm not listening," Jepha says.

"Okay, but I'm going to come on your face, so you might want to listen for me telling you when, so you can make sure you don't go blind and have to spend the rest of your life explaining you had a dick related accident to everyone who asks."

"Not listening," Jepha says, sing-song, and flops an arm out of the bathtub to grab at the dirty knee of Dan's jeans and tug, tug until they work down his hips as far at they can. Dan's hips push forward gently into the pressure of his waistband hanging low enough. Every time Jepha pulls a little the friction is knee-weakening, a little better, a little worse until he thinks _fuck it_, and unbuttons his jeans and grabs his dick.

Jepha's fingers find the back of his knee, his callused fingertips softly dragging over the weirdly sensitive skin there. It sends goose pimples fanning out across Dan's skin like ripples in a puddle. He strokes his dick in time to Jepha's fingers and watches Jepha's frustrated arousal, his pretty little smirk where he looks half embarrassed by the fact he's got someone jerking off over him, but Dan knows he likes it, there's something knowing in the quirk of his lips and the way he glances up at Dan.

Jepha struggles more upright, ends up curled around himself, then kneeling. He puts his hands around both Dan's legs now, just holds him gently, leaning out of the bath a little, and doesn't touch anywhere else... he'd suck Dan's dick if Dan asked. Dan twists his hand and palms the head of his dick, his knees shuddering a little.

Jepha pops another button on his own jeans. Dan watches the shadowed skin come out and his pants fall off his skinny ass a little. He should, his hips push into his own hand jerking hard and fast, he should, he should, oh fuck, he should tell Jepha to stop touching himself. But, fuck.

"Uhh." Dan loses his thoughts to the movement of his hand over his dick, Jepha's fingers on his skin, to the way his hips push at just the right moment he's not sure if he's going to come now, now-- on the edge. All he's trying to say comes out as _ugh_ and breathing.

Jepha's inky knuckles press against his dick though his pants. Dan wants to say, stop that, wants to _bite_ Jepha's fingers, suck the tiny raw valleys his teeth leave, and he's going to come, eyes on Jepha's hand, eyes on Jepha being wound up by him, so tense, as fucked by this as Dan is, and Dan wonders if Jepha even realises he's rubbing against his own hand with the same rhythm he's still stroking the naked skin at the back of Dan's knee. He wants to remind Jepha, right now, he's not allowed to come, and watch Jepha's face--

"Jeph--" he gets out before he's coming, and there's no need for the rest of what he's saying anyway because Jepha opens his mouth and leans in, oh fuck, and Dan moves his hand through his orgasm as the splash of his come against Jepha's tongue and chin drags what feels like impossibly more out of him until he's sure he's just turned his balls inside out.

He breathes though his nose until his heart rate slows. Jepha looks up at him, pupils large, dark eyed and dirty, Dan's come on his face and his own hand still rubbing on his pants.

"Jepha," Dan says. "Take your hand off your dick."

* * *

_One plane ride and a short drive: LA_

"Hey, Bert," Quinn says.

Bert ignores him.

"Hey, hey, Bert, why don't fish smoke pot?" Quinn continues, _unpeturbbbeded_ by Bert turning to face him slowly and giving him nothing but a cocked eyebrow and a nostril distorted by the addition of a finger. Quinn is used to Bert picking his nose and he has learned from the masters of talking people into submission. His own personal strategy just happens to involve bad jokes, rather than random bursts of Bertourettes.

"BECAUSE!" Quinn forges on past Bert's thick eyebrow-ed semi-frown, and Bert sucking snot off his own finger loudly. Quinn just gets louder because he's bored and Bert's been a princess and he can pay Quinn some attention, damn it. "_Because_ they're afraid they might get _hooked_."

Jepha's immediate groan of mock-pain (Quinn knows it is mock pain because A: he's heard Jepha moaning in real pain, sexy pain, and what the fuck did Bert just do pain and B: Jepha tells worse jokes. Quinn isn't entirely sure this isn't one of his anyway) is excessively loud and dramatic, but it's still drowned out quickly by Bert's shrieky giggle, high-pitched and music to Quinn's ears. Bert gives him that look, the one that says _I love you_ with nothing but quick bright blue eyes.

"That's terrible," Jepha says, smiling wide.

Dan leans over from where he's been sitting on the floor with his sticks and a practice pad, fucking around for reasons known solely to himself, and plays the joke-punctuating drum roll on Jepha's thighs: baddum-tish.

Jepha's legs twitch as Dan hits somewhere sensitive, or maybe he's just worried Dan's going to smack him in the balls with one of his sticks. They're fucking thick, Quinn would probably be attempting to ram one up Dan's nose if Dan had smacked him that hard, that close to his nuts. Jepha pretends he's ignoring Dan and Quinn watches him shift on the couch, close his legs, flick his Wiimote at the screen, then pause his game, sigh, and let his legs fall open again.

"You're not even trying," Quinn says, then realises he's forgotten to provide _context_.

"Fuck you," Jepha says, which mean he's knows exactly what Quinn's talking about anyway.

Quinn smirks.

"You're so easy for anyone who'll smack your ass."

"Fuckass," Jepha replies, facing Quinn like Dan's not tapping out a sharp, fast rhythm on Jepha's inner thighs. "At least I don't come the second someone sticks a finger up my a_sssss_," he trails off with a hiss when Dan taps lightly on Jepha's crotch with one of his sticks, then smiles, like a happy dog with a toy, the kind of blood-thirsty-happy dogs get when they find a lizard or a mouse to play with. Jepha's hips twitch, a startled jerk away, then a tiny little jerk upwards.

Bert shriek-giggles again and points at Quinn. "BUTT. SLUT."

"Yeah, he has a point," Dan says, holding both his sticks in one hand and taking his eyes off Jepha's spread legs to look at Quinn.

"Fuck you all," Quinn says, and feels his face get hot, his _neck_ get hot, and his traitorous dick twitch. He shifts in his seat. "You don't know shit about my ass." The fucked up thing is just mentioning his ass while everyone's looking at him is getting him hard and he thinks he could come with fingers up his ass, even without anyone touching his dick.

"I know all the shit in your ass. I know each one by name," Bert says. As if the insinuation that there's anything at all he doesn't know about Quinn is a deeply insulting idea. "STEVE," he announces loudly. "GEORGE. MICHAEL--"

"George Michael?" Dan asks, punctuating with a grin and a pinch of Jepha's thigh. Jepha squirms silently and Quinn smirks. "You have George Michael in your ass?"

Bert lets out a gleeful noise. "When you have to shit, he starts singing--_wake me up, before you go-go--_"

Quinn does something he hasn't done for a long time: he shouts, "STOP. SINGING." He fucking _hates_ George Michael.

"It makes sense though," Jepha adds, the little smirk on his face that Quinn knows means _Jepha_ knows he's just being a faeces-shush. Fucking. Shit stirrer. "George Michael, ass."

Quinn actually has no come back to this-- it's that fucking stupid, he justifies. So he just throws himself sideways on the couch and attempts to smother Jepha in the couch cushions.

"Controller!" Jepha gasps out and Quinn shoves his face into the slightly stained couch cushion happily, "_digging into my fucking underarm_."

"That'll teach you for inreferencering that I let George fucking Michael in my ass," Quinn gets out - before the world turns round and round like that time he smoked too much and then he and Bert found that really huge grassy hill to roll all the way down, terrifying and only painful when they'd come down and realised there were _rocks_ in that grass.

He makes a noise like a cat throwing up, _hork_, and finds the world-blur turning into Dan's face, above him, Dan's hands on his wrists and his tongue poking out like he's concentrating.

Quinn also feels a hand tugging at his belt and is momentarily really impressed with Dan's apparent new psychic powers of being able to undress him and hold him down, until Dan shifts and he sees Bert there, de-pantsing him for reasons best known to himself.

"I have an idea," Bert says. His gigglefit has disappeared and left him wearing his vulnerable and serious expression, the one that could mean he's about to ask to bum some smokes from Quinn or he's going to ask Quinn to help him write his will.

"What?" Quinn says, and realises, even though there's nothing holding him down at this point, Dan's sitting cross-legged on the floor beside his head and Quinn can only see his knees, and Jepha's still on the couch, Quinn just happens to have left his arms where Dan's plonked them, sprawled above his head on the carpet.

"What?" Quinn repeats and Bert shuffles up to sit on his stomach, a little heavier than Quinn expects, still. Quinn looks up at Bert and Bert looks down at him and leans down so the familiar curtain of hair engulfs them both, like a wall between them and everything else.

"I'm gonna fuck you," Bert says.

Quinn curls his lip: they don't really _fuck_, he's not inherently into the idea of _dick_ in his ass, unlike, say, _Jepha_, and he opens his mouth to tell Bert to fuck Jepha (while Jepha can't come-- the idea's equally hilarious and hot) but Bert talks over him--

"With my _hand_."

Quinn feels a shiver run up his spine, his face flushes hot. "You mean--"

"With my _fist_ in your _ass_," Bert continues, eyes wide open and his face dipping closer to Quinn, their noses nearly brushing, Bert watching him and watching him with all his attention. He should be used to it, but it still makes him feel like they're teenagers again and Quinn's in that first flush of _how the fuck is he real_. "I want to put my whole hand inside you so deep I can feel your heart beating."

Dan snickers off to the side of them and the couch creaks. Quinn should laugh, it sounds half like a threat, but what comes out of his mouth isn't actually the dismissive chuckle he'd like, it's more a half-groan he had no idea was there. Bert isn't even touching his dick, for fuck's sake, and Quinn feels himself getting hard. Butt. Slut.

"I'm going to go get some... tea," Jepha announces, sounding strained, at which Dan laughs harder. _Hilarifies. _

Bert pulls back and the moment breaks, but Quinn's still left flushed and half hard and he's going to be seriously annoyed if Bert gets distracted now. Dan throws something; it hits Quinn in the head and he startles way too hard, his head pounding.

"What the fuck!" Quinn snaps, then turns his head to find himself eye to eye with a bottle of lube, the cap half off. Dan wiggles his eyebrows at Quinn. "Why do we have a huge bottle of lube in the lounge?" Quinn asks, when it occurs to him, but the answer's pretty obvious before Dan even replies.

"Boy Scout Jepha. He's got several badges in assfucking."

"Assfuckery," Bert corrects and reaches back to stick his hand down the open fly of Quinn's pants.

"I heard that," Jepha yells from the other room. "It's _assfuckology_. I have six badges and a doctorate!"

"And you're not going to be complaining about lube in a minute," Dan adds.

Quinn feels his dick twitch in Bert's hand and smacks his head against the carpet, hard.

"Also," Dan continues, "I think we should actually find a mattress."

Bert's small hand (and Quinn is wondering if he's going to be thankful for Bert's small hands, if he'll be able to handle it, Bert's hand _inside him_) stroking his dick teasingly. "Bed," Quinn agrees, because he really is easy for this.

_Bed…_

Three fingers in and Quinn is writhing, hands and knees, naked from the waist down and forgetting his shirt utterly, thinking this is the best idea Bert has ever, ever, ever had, and for each finger in his ass his vocabulary has been cut in half and all he's left with is _fuck_.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck—"

And Bert nudges a fourth finger at his asshole, not in, just touching. Quinn's stretched and sensitive and he feels it on hot, lube-soaked, slick skin, dirty fucking skin that's being pushed apart by Bert's greedy shoving fingers. Three fingers shouldn't feel like a lot, maybe, but it _does_, and the nudge of Bert's fourth and the thought of more are feeding into Quinn's near-hyperventilating state.

"Yeah?" Bert asks.

Quinn hangs his head for a second and thinks, _give me a second, give me a second,_ but instead of really trying to form a coherent reply he just shoves his hips back on every _second_. He doesn't want a second, he just wants _more_.

Dan's hand is on his face like a slap, cold enough against his cheek it startles him.

"Fuck," Quinn gets out again, then realises that _fuck_ is still not an answer.

"Yeah?" Dan asks, more slowly than Bert, like he really expects an answer. "You've got to breathe, Quinn, if you come now, Bert'll stop, and if you don't try and breathe more slowly, you're going to pass out."

Dan says this in the Jepha-voice. The one he uses when he's telling Jepha to stay still or bend over or, or, or whatever, and Quinn wants to snap out a _fuck you_, but instead he just tries to breathe a bit slower, tries to ignore the way Bert's shifting and the little twitches of his fingers in Quinn's ass.

"Okay," Quinn gets out, licks his lips, then lets his mouth hang open again.

"You can take it, Quinny-Quinn," Bert says and the tip of his finger (four, four, _four_, Quinn thinks and wills his breath slower and pushes back into it because he can't not). "It's not so bad, it's okay. Imagine," Bert pushes in, four fingers into the knuckles, "if it was," pushes as far as he can go and Quinn feels like he's going to split apart in five different ways, but not before he comes all over everything like a fucking fire hose without anyone even putting a hand on his dick, "Dan's hand."

Quinn groans, long and loud, suddenly and obscenely conscious of Dan's long fingered, rough palmed hands, one on his cheek, one on his shoulder; both huge, huger than Bert's piano nimble, clever hands. Dan stands steady as a mountain in front of where Quinn's all fours on the bed and raises his both his eyebrows when Quinn looks at him.

Calm, controlled, how the fuck. Quinn lets his head drop again and says something that may have started as _fuck_ but he loses that part of his vocabulary too as Dan's hand leaves his shoulder and he feels more lube drip cold down his asscrack.

"You and Jepha could totally have asshole contests," Dan snickers into the top of Quinn's head.

"Quinn is a bigger asshole," Bert replies, and Dan huffs into Quinn's ear and Quinn can in no way formulate a comeback right now at all ever. Bert's thumb is stroking around his stretched ass, slick and ticklish, like a tongue, like he's eating Quinn's ass while he's four fucking fingers deep.

"Fourteen inches," Dan says, "you were there."

Quinn finds that he's still capable of laughing, if laughter can sound something like "hahaoooooohhhhfuck," because he remembers Jepha and that dildo that had to have been modelled of a fucking horse. Quinn laugh-groans again and sounds demented to his own ears, his ass clenching every time his chest shudders with a gasp of laughter and Bert's thumb still rubbing like a tongue, his fingers slipping in and out just a little.

Then Bert presses a slick finger (other hand, other hand) to the strip of skin just behind Quinn's balls and Quinn makes this noise that comes from right deep down in the middle of him and he can't hear anything at all for a minute, can't see anything but black behind his eyelids.

"You're actually fucking--" Jepha's voice appears in the room and Quinn wonders how long he's been there.

Quinn thinks he's just missed a beat in time. His face feels sweaty and hot flushed.

"Actually fisting," Dan supplies.

Bert's fingers drag ever so lightly across Quinn's balls and Quinn's back bows until he thinks he's going to snap in half, he's so tense from that tiny little touch.

"More," he groans out. He wants Bert's hand inside him, all the way in him, his whole hand, huge in the context of _Quinn's fucking ass_. When he comes he wants it _in him_, but he can't express that many useless goddamn words right now so he just repeats, "_More_."

Bert pushes his thumb in and Quinn's eyes close and his mouth opens and he groans and he feels like his intestines are going to slide out of his mouth and he's going to split in half and he's going to come so hard he drowns in it and dies and he's going to kiss Bert hard on the lips later and lick his way down his throat. Wet wet hot stretching—he feels the muscle of his ass contract around Bert's wrist. Bert's fist is _inside his ass_.

His fingers curl up into claws around the edges of the bed, feels like he's holding on for his life, tries to hold himself still while he can feel, he swears, every time Bert's pulse beats through his wrist, every pump of his blood.

"I'm going to blow him," Jepha says.

Quinn thinks his fingers may cramp from holding on so tight, but he's fly apart if he has to let go. He tries to nod, but just ends up shaking his head vaguely and hoping it translates as the _yes_ that's screaming through his head, his trembling thighs, his hard dick.

Dan strokes his cheek and Quinn feels like the only two points he exists anymore are at that warm bit of cheek Dan's hand is on and his asshole, his ass, Bert's hand inside, until Jepha contorts himself somehow and gets his mouth of Quinn's dick.

"Auuuuuuuugh," Quinn lets out, and then grits his teeth against the _ohgods_ and can't stop the hitching breaths, _huh huh huh hnn uhhh_. As his hips twitch down just a little, _ffffff_ hisses out between his swollen lips and teeth.

Dan breathes jerkily onto Quinn's face, his fingers soft and rough and rough and soft around Quinn's cheeks and chin. It feels nice. Nice, nice, nice. It's not the right word. Nice is, like, ice-cream. Dan's hands on his face and Jepha's sloppy-soft stoner mouth on his fucking dick and Bert's hand playing fucking Frere Jacques on his prostate doesn't really compare with nice.

Bert's face is tickly against his spine, and Quinn more feels than hears him mumbling some bullshit into his hot-sticky-tight skin; Bert's actually licking him now, with his _fucking tongue_ when the words actually catch up with his mind and translate themselves from mutter-scrapes of half-shaven beard on sensitive back into actual sense: _I could so live in your ass forever_.

Quinn breathes in slow, shallow bursts, trying to keep himself on an even keel. Dan's catcher's mitt hands on his cheeks kind of help with that but Jepha's piercings banging on his balls don't really help at all. He can feel saliva around his dick like it's floating but the sensation gets all muddled in his fucking head with Bert's fingers. Shit's weird, a hand moving _inside_ him. Weird-good.

"Ffffffuck," Quinn hisses, and Dan strokes his eyebrow.

"That's right." It's a mindless answer to an involuntary sound and Quinn hardly hears it; Jepha's mouth is a long tunnel of fucking awesome on his dick and Bert's holding his ass steady with the hand that isn't actually fucking _up_ it.

"Fffff…" Quinn gasps, his lips clamped together in case his actual stomach leaps out. And he fucks back onto Bert's hand, his eyelids drooping shut as his mouth droops open. Dan closes one hand around his wrists, locking long fingers over his tendons like Quinn stands any chance of even _wanting_ to go anywhere.

His mind's putty in his head; Bert's stopped making cracks about glove puppets and started on stroking the outside of his ass in time with the lazy slow movements of the hand he has _inside_ Quinn. Quinn lets his face rest on Dan's forearms – Dan's muttering something else now: encouragement, admonition, random bullshit, Quinn has no idea. Just likes the subvocal rumble of words washing through his ears along with his racing blood. Shame Jepha's got his mouth full, he makes pretty awesome sex noise.

There's a pull on his dick, wet and wonderful, sloppy-intense, and Quinn reassess his opinion: it's not any kind of fucking shame that Jepha has his mouth full.

If Quinn could bend right now, if he could get his hands out of Dan's grip, if he could concentrate, he would reach down (and maybe not stroke his own chest on the way but probably he _would_) and pet Jepha's head for being so freaking awesome at sucking dick. No one sucks dick like Jepha.

"Nnnnnn_auh_," Quinn murmurs as Bert's fingers crook into a "C" and he feels so full there's no room for thought, it's all being forced into his balls and his legs are shaking, his thighs and his biceps are shaking, shaking. "Ffffucking…."

He's sort of … swaying … his hands in Dan's grip, his dick in Jepha's mouth, his ass in Bert's … control … and as Dan nibbles lazily on Quinn's unresponsive mouth he can feel something huge brewing in his veins, lurking in his balls. This is going to be one fucknormous monster of an orgasm, one of those spine-melting deals where he's so docile for so long after that Bert does shit like drape Kraft slices on his dick and his face and he just doesn't move or care. It's going to be _immense_.

"Ffffuck," he warns, as Dan smothers his tongue with beery lips. It's hot and everything, but Quinn kind of needs his mouth to breathe with. This 'being so turned on they can probably see it in space' deal requires a lot of oxygen.

Even with Dan's mouth over his and black dots populating what's left of his vision through his eyelashes and distraction, Quinn can hear the sounds he's making, bouncing off Dan's teeth. They're … pretty fucking pornographic. They're coming up from the same place at the base of his spine that his motherbitch orgasm is and they sound like it, they - _he_ sounds like a guy who is just about to come his fucking brains out –

Dan pulls away from his mouth and says, "Quit playing with yourself."

"Effff yoooooouuuu," Quinn manages between gasps for air.

"Not you, _him_."

Quinn doesn't bother to care what that means. His legs are on the very brink of collapse. He's going to accidently choke Jepha to death with dick if he falls now, but Bert's playing fucking Chopsticks on Quinn's prostate and his brain and willpower are liquid.

In that moment he's the whole goddamn universe. Jepha's hand reaches up and grabs his balls and it's all too fucking much.

"Imgonanigommaimgonnagonna uhhh imm gonna Berrrrrtt immm fuck I'm gonna uhh uhhh ffffffuck imm…"

Dan kisses Quinn's cheek, leans into his ear and says, "Do it," breathy and sticky and --

Quinn's fucking high in his own skull, ignoring the spluttering noise from below, ignoring everything except the feeling of his balls emptying themselves to little testicle husks, down into Jepha's open throat; he falls face-first into Dan's lap and mumbles incoherent psalms into one thigh while Dan rearranges the sweat-ruined strands of his thinning hair.

"Oh. My. God," he murmurs, hoping no one else can hear him until he's regained control of his mouth and the stupid shit coming out of it – his limbs, floppy Jello-boned traitors, may take longer.

But Bert has excellent ears. "That's me!"

"Asshole," Quinn tells Dan's crotch, more accurately.

"That's where my hand is," Bert agrees.

There is an uncomfortable and complicated movement which Quinn doesn't entirely pay attention to despite it involving his hips being lifted; Jepha flop-wriggles his head out from under Quinn's belly. There will be snail-trails of Quinn-come on his face but Quinn's too tired and invertebrate now to find it hot or even interesting enough to look at.

"I might stay here forever and ever and ever and ever. I think I'm never going to take my hand out of your butt. Ever," Bert says, flexing his fingers.

"What if I need to poop?" Quinn can't seem to get his face out of Dan's crotch, for all that it smells of ballcheese and smoke and for all that Bert's hand in his ass is getting pretty fucking uncomfortable now.

"Shit in my hand," Bert instructs with almost convincing earnestness. "It says so in the Bible, Quinn, the motherfucking Bible: 'let us shit in each other's hands that we might be fulfilled'."

"You're fulfilled with _shit_ already," Dan observes.

"I'll shit you out," Quinn grunts, pretending to strain; he's not even sure where half his muscles even are any more. They're not talking to his brain. "BAM. Poop-hand cannon."

"PROLAPSE!" Bert shrieks, slapping him on the ass.

"Hey, Bert," Dan says with a sudden shock, "you know who I know who has a prolapsed rectum?"

Quinn can feel it coming in the distance but Bert evidently can't, because he's too damn busy babbling about puppet shows and moving furniture into Quinn's enormous slut ass and whatever…

"Who?" Jepha asks instead. He sounds a little pissy. Quinn couldn't give less of a shi--a fu—he couldn't care less.

"Your mom," Dan says with aplomb and gravity.

"Your mom _is_ a prolapsed rectum," Bert retorts, wriggling his hand. Quinn winces. The feeling of someone trying to flip the bird inside his ass is, as perhaps is to be expected, not wonderful.

"We don't like to talk about it," Dan sighs, scratching the back of Quinn's head. It's not a _petpetpetpet_ scratch like Quinn's seen him give Jepha, more a _you have lumps of dandruff and I'm going to get them all off_ scratch. "It makes Thanksgiving so awkward. She was such a happy asshole before the hernia."

Quinn would like to _not_ be laughing an exhausted wheeze while Bert's jiggling about _inside his fucking ass_ like that but apparently it's not his day for that.

Dan stops scraping skin off Quinn's scalp and adds, "Always winking her little sphincter," in tones of deep regret.

"Quinn's asshole is staring at me," Bert says, affronted. There's definitely less hand in there than before, but it's really not helping as much as he'd hoped.

There is no reasonable or unreasonable answer to this. Quinn settles further into the lumpy mattress of Jepha and Dan's body parts and shuts his eyes firmly. Maybe if he passes out he'll wake up and Bert won't have his hand up Quinn's ass anymore.

Then again, knowing Bert, there will be something worse in Quinn's ass when he comes around.

* * *

"Dan," Bert points at him with his two middle fingers in case anyone doesn't know who he's talking about, "Dandandandandan… you've got something in your mouth."

Dan frowns and feels around in his mouth, beer bottle precariously close to spilling. "What?"

"MY TONGUE." Bert scrambles over the back of the sofa and latches himself bodily onto Dan, his legs around his hips making a determined case for the loss of Dan's as always low-hanging pants, his own ass only just resting on the back of the sofa at all.

"Mmpf," Dan suggests, but as Bert kisses him he just locks his fingers around the small of Bert's back and kisses right back.

After maybe a minute Quinn looks sideways at Jepha and says, "Fifty bucks Bert bites his tongue," as Jepha rubs the short stubble on his own chin with a look of great concentration.

"He's not gonna _now_, he can hear you."

"How much does Bert like me losing bets?" Quinn says thoughtfully and in a louder voice than he really needs to use, drumming his fingers on his chin. Jepha mimics him and stares at the ceiling in contemplation. "Is it more or less than Bert likes biting people in the tongue?"

"He never bites _me_ in the tongue," Jepha says very sadly.

"Bullshit." The odds of this being true are approximately a billion to one. Bert's teeth are like lint: they get everywhere you don't want them to be.

"Never," Jepha repeats, pouting until his snakebites look like arrows: DICK GOES HERE.

"Aww, Jepha_ree_, I'll bite you in the tongue. Stick it out."

"It's just …" Jepha mock-sniffles and rubs at his eyes. "It's just not the same, Quinn. He has _special_ teeth."

Quinn knocks on Jepha's head. "In his va-gi-na."

Bert gives them both the finger but doesn't actually stop making out with Dan, whose hands have inched down his back to cup Bert's ass like a seat. Dan's hands are big enough and Bert's ass is small enough that he almost doesn't touch the sofa any more.

"Has Bert ever bitten you in the tongue with his vag teeth?" Quinn strokes Jepha's hair absently, having apparently forgotten to take his hand away after knocking on his skull. Jepha smirks and tips his head back.

"I told the _cops_ no," Jepha says in a stage-whisper, "but that's 'cause he bribed me with pocky and foot rubs."

"You're so cheap," Quinn says, then, "You should sue," in a very serious voice, stroking down the side of his face with his fingers spread. They are drunk. They are very drunk. Fucking drunk. Not as drunk as Bert, which is why neither of _them_ has "COCKSNOT" written on their foreheads in permanent marker pen, but drunk nonetheless.

"It'd never stand up in court," Jepha mumbles, pushing Quinn's hand down around his throat and giving the fingers an encouraging squeeze. Quinn's guitar-rough hand clenches tighter over the face of the inked bat and Jepha makes a happy wet sound, his thighs falling further open.

"It'd stand up if we put thread through the ring and pulled. Like a puppet. Bounce bounce." Quinn presses in with his thumb, his eyes half-shut. Jepha makes a sound like an asphyxiating seagull. "Oh wow. Make that noise again? It's … I think I can do that with a sliding chord. Maybe."

He flexes his fingers but this time Jepha's sound is lost in his teeth and tongue and he just goes limper. "Hey, Bert. I don't want to play guitar any more. I want to play a Jepha, listen—" he squeezes Jepha's throat and grabs a nipple indiscriminately at the same time. "Sexnoise Accordion. BAM."

Bert's reply is largely consumed by Dan's mouth – they're still making out, mostly, sloppy-slow, and Dan's face is pink as a slapped ass with beer-glow and stubble rash – but Quinn's had years and years of translating from Bert's kiss-spoken words: "I thought you wanted to be a fucking rock god, not a porn star."

"Stop limiting my vision, man. I'm going to be both." Quinn rests the side of his hand in the dip of Jepha's throat and eyeballs him through the one eye he can actually keep open. "What do you taste like?"

"Porn and yerba maté tea," Jepha murmurs, "and your—"

"DICK." Quinn flicks him in the nipple, which he immediately regrets, and Jepha squirms, his hips bouncing up as his thighs jerk wider apart and nudge at Quinn's legs. "Ow. Your nipple is violent."

"_Pierced_," Jepha corrects. "I was going to say I taste of your mom but you know what, I can taste of your dick too." He squeezes Quinn's hand around his neck hopefully and tries to catch his eye; Quinn whips around to see what Bert and Dan are doing.

Bert and Dan are _still_ making out.

"You disgust meeeeeee," Quinn calls, cupping his free hand around his mouth to help the sound carry. "It's your fault I'm gaying up with Jepha. Yours. All your homofaggotry scared my straight off the fucking bus—"

Jepha makes a small noise in his throat, scrabbles for air, and says sweetly if a little woozily, "You are the _least_ straight p-person in this fucking band…"

Quinn swings his leg over Jepha's splayed hips on the third drunk-wobbly try and straddles him triumphantly, denim to tacky-ass manmade track pants, his hand still loosely cupped over Jepha's batacle.

"When I come on your face, you get more gay," Quinn whispers loudly. "It's like … face AIDS."

"Increase the gay," Jepha agrees in a slurred, warm snigger, raising his eyebrows but leaving his eyelids drooping.

"Don't let him come on your face!" Bert yells. From the muttered 'ow' that follows immediately after, Quinn guesses he shrieked it right into Dan's teeth or something. "It's like fucking glue! And it's itchy! And—mmmmppffff _hi_…"

"Not up my nose," is Jepha's only request, though. "Bert did that once, it stings."

Quinn hasn't so much as unzipped his jeans yet, so the warning's kinda a long way premature; he strokes beery fingers up Jepha's jugular and goes cross-eyed on purpose. He sticks his tongue out.

"Bertface," Jepha mouths, and Quinn feels his dumb expression slip into a scowl like a drunk off a barroom table. A dancing, falling drunk. Quinn, essentially. Jepha's fingers (_h – a – n – d_) stalk up Quinn's thigh like a nervous spider; Quinn pushes down against him and falls sideways onto the sofa again –

"_Glurk_," Jepha says, because Quinn hasn't really taken into account his hand on Jepha's throat.

\-- and why are they acting like horny but tragically Christian teens in a movie theatre, all slow and cautious groping with no actual action? Right. It's because Quinn's too drunk to straddle Jepha with doing them both a serious injury. Motherfucker.

He digs his fingers back into both sides of Jepha's neck and feels Jepha's thigh go tense-then-loose beside his; breath that bursts like he's drowning, sounds like a seagull, Jepha's … ahaha … a _beach_, bitch.

Normally that's the kind of fucking insightful humour Quinn would be eager to share but Bert and Dan are probably busy trying to suck each other's brains out with their tongues still anyhow, and Jepha's hand is on the crotch of his pants already and rubbing through the thin sweaty manmade fibres.

His hips move toward Jepha's hands on autopilot; his hand tightens on Jepha's throat very deliberately.

"Blow him," Bert's voice is breathy and muffled by mouth but it carries.

Quinn's free hand flips the bird without this brain getting involved; freaking bossy little asshole.

"_Don't_," Dan advises, "he's not –" but the rest of his sentence is ob … oblit … oblitomated … by probably Bert's fucking tongue again. It's hard to talk with Bert's massive fucker of a tongue in your mouth, Quinn knows. He supplies the rest of it anyhow: _allowed to come_.

Doesn't mean Quinn can't get off, right?

He lets go Jepha's throat to a sound of frustration from its owner, and puts his hand over Jepha's, pushing it into his crotch until the pressure makes _him_ gasp too.

"Don't be a prick," Jepha complains, but he doesn't exactly jerk his hand away either.

Quinn closes his hand around Jepha's hand and rubs up along the line of his dick, pressed as it is against his pants in an obvious lump. He closes his eyes, ripples his fingers over Jepha's hand – Jepha doesn't fucking _get it_, just sits still, his thigh against Quinn's and his hand on Quinn's dick.

"Go ooooon," Quinn mutters, doing it again.

"What?" Jepha shifts beside him, sliding further into the sofa.

"Copy meeee," Quinn says under his breath, trying and failing to keep the whine to himself.

"Huh." But Jepha does, making a wave from his fingers over Quinn's dick, making it try to jump in the narrow confines of his pants. "Shall I get that out?"

Quinn doesn't answer him, just pulls Jepha's hand slowly, slowly up and more quickly down, pressing the heel of his palm into the back of Jepha's hand; Jepha follows suit. It's like … time-delayed jerking off … and it makes him feel stoned on top of drunk. That special kind of stoned where what you see doesn't keep up with what you're looking at so you have constant déjà vu. He's pretty sure he's thought that before…

The friction feels _good_; cheap manmade pants skating over his dick (it's not that boxer shorts are for pussies so much as they're for people who remember to do laundry) under Jepha's touch – Quinn throws his head back into cushions and lets the rest of his body go jelly-limp.

Time-delay jerking off. He's a goddamn genius.

He moves his hand lazy and syrupy, and Jepha's hand comes too; it's like a dead-arm tug. Heat and pressure and fingers and a hand that does what he wants it to – Quinn's other hand seems to have strayed up to his chest and started stroking between his nipples, but what the hell. It feels good.

And he kinda wants to kiss someone right now, but he kinda doesn't want to move that much and anyway kissing Jepha makes his mouth all confused with that … all the metal in it.

"No," Dan says, cutting through what's left of his thoughts. Jepha's hand stops and Quinn frowns with his eyes shut. What the fuck? What the actual gold-plated fuck?

He opens his eyes. Bert's sitting cross-legged on the floor, Dan's head in his lap, busily braiding greasy Dan-hair into streaky thin rattails, because Bert doesn't really do "sit still and do nothing".

Dan's looking at the sofa, but not at … Quinn.

Quinn rolls his head sideways to favour Jepha with a drunken grimace and tell him to get fuck back to what he was doing, but alcohol and ballsache have dry-raped his vocabulary, so he just says, "What?" and closes one eye.

Jepha's _other_ hand, he can see now, is still on his own dick. Still, but on it. And he's not. Not allowed to come right now. Oh, right. Now. That.

"No," Dan repeats from Bert's lap, "or you lose _everything_."

Quinn rolls his eyes. "Your fucking retarded bet."

* * *

Dan is failing at playing _Pretty Handsome Awkward_, because he's too busy trying to juggle his sticks in between beats or something that _could_ look really awesome if he didn't currently suck at it.

"Jesus, my little sister could play that better," Quinn says, then throws a handful of chips at Dan, most of which flutter harmlessly to the carpets around the drum kit, because chips are not noted for their aerodynamic qualities. Quinn spits a wad of half chewed chips after it that smacks audibly into the bass drum.

"You don't have a little sister," Dan says, and attempts to flip one of his sticks, as he has been for the past ten minutes, between beats without losing rhythm.

"Exactly," Quinn replies and throws the empty chip packet, which also goes just far enough to land lightly in Dan's lap. Dan stands up and throws his sticks over his shoulder in one motion.

"That's it. You're dead, Allman."

Bert whoops and Jepha smirks and when Dan chases Quinn out of the room, through two more rooms, and into what passes for a bedroom with Bert in hot pursuit, hollering his encouragement.

Jepha would like to say that this is a perfectly reasonable explanation for why he's currently buried in a pile of limbs, a sweaty, panting, insulting pile that's working gradually away from _fuck yous_ to breathy _fucks_. So it's not _perfectly_ reasonable, but this is his life, so he goes with it, someone's hand in his hard and his teeth gently biting Bert's shoulder, until—

"Ow," Bert says. Jepha removes his teeth quickly, he hadn't been biting hard—

"Ow," Bert repeats. This second 'ow' is a lot more frantic than the first. "Ow owowowow. Motherfucker. Mother_fucker_! Stop now. NOW!" There's a confused pause and Bert adds, "Ow. My fucking foot get off my fucking foot whoever is on my foot GET THE FUCK OFF IT." He sounds close to tears.

There's another moment of confusion, although a touch more active one, and soon no one is touching Bert at all, backed up against the walls just to make fucking sure. He's gone very pale and is examining his foot with a blank and horrified expression.

"What?" Quinn snaps. Jepha's not feeling especially sympathetic himself; Bert is too prone to pulling shit like this for no good reason and he's wound up and tired and his dick is twitching and he's -- _fuck_.

Bert's foot is very definitely _not right_. It is lying at the wrong angle, like someone tried to draw him and forgot how anatomy worked. It's also the wrong colour, all the skin tone bled out of it and gathered at his ankle.

"Fuck," Jepha says aloud – quietly, quietly as Quinn crawls up onto the end of the bed and lays his head down next to Bert's foot, breathing hard and looking pretty freaked out. Jepha tears his gaze away from the foot and looks up at Bert's china-white face and scrunched-up line of a mouth. "Are you –"

"One of you motherfuckers," Bert says in a voice as ghostly as his skin, "is going to drive me to an ER _RIGHT FUCKING NOW_." He seems torn between putting his hands around his ankle to check for damage and keeping them well away from the pain, his voice fluttering and unsteady, verging on a choke-sob half-way through his yell. Eventually Bert settles on putting his hands on Quinn's head and hissing through his teeth.

"Watch what you're doing next time," Quinn says quietly.

"Fuck you, you bag of dicks," Bert hisses in miserable tones. "IT HURRRRTS."

"Jesus, stop being such a drama whore," Quinn grumbles, and he sounds about as convincing as a pitch-shifted sing-whore from stage school. Jepha looks around for Dan, but he's already out of the room, looking for car keys.

"Bert," Jepha says, and stops. There's fucking nothing he can say that Quinn's not already saying, his face pressed against Bert's thigh and his fingers wrapped up in Bert's and probably hurting from how hard they're being squeezed, and there's not a lot he can do that Dan's not already doing, finding the car, finding the keys.

So he's fucking _useless_.

"You all suck," Bert says, his voice wavering still. "YOU ALL FUCKING SUCK AND I HATE YOU." He punches Quinn in the shoulder and Quinn does nothing but kiss him messily on the leg, through his shorts.

"Car," Dan says from the doorway, waving keys. "Hobbling time, Hopalong Bert."

Bert slides slowly to the edge of the bed, and Jepha feels randomly angry with himself for not being bigger as Dan sets his shoulder under Bert's armpit on one side and Quinn does the same on the other, more or less lifting him off the floor. Sure, Dan's not that much taller than him, maybe an inch or two, but he's _stronger_ no matter how many fucking push-ups Jepha does.

He settles for holding the doors open and giving Bert an encouraging smile which Bert totally ignores in favour of screaming into Quinn's neck. Quinn awkwardly pets his hand and calls him a whiny bitch; Bert bites him.

Bert doesn't even bother to sit up in the back of the car, just sprawls across the back seats and slaps Quinn when he lifts Bert's head into his lap. It's a first; normally if Dan's driving they're fighting over who gets shotgun and Jepha's pretty much guaranteed a spot at the back, but now he's in the unfamiliar territory next to Dan's elbow and the car is stupid-hot and he thinks maybe the air-con broke.

"You're such a fucking whiny whore," Quinn says. Jepha looks in the driver's mirror as Dan starts the engine and _thank god_ the air-con chokes into an approximation of life, "it's just a sprained ankle. Crybaby. Asshole." Quinn's stroking Bert's hair off his face, and Bert keeps poking him in the arm, the hand, anything he can reach.

Emergency rooms are the one place on earth where no one stares at anyone, even if someone's, say, not wearing his shirt and is covered in tattoos of weird shit, and if someone else has a drawing of a voodoo shrunken head on his face in marker pen and everyone looks worried but also _really fucking high_ and two people are not wearing shoes. Everyone has more important shit to worry about.

They wait.

And they wait.

And they wait.

And then a nurse with acne scars on her face and huge hands with red-raw fingers comes and gives Bert some pills to shut him up grizzling; Bert swallows them dry and leans into Quinn like Quinn's a wall instead of a not-especially enormous guy with a receding hairline and Quinn puts his arm over Bert's shoulder and his fingernails against Jepha's arm, and Dan starts tapping something aimless onto the top of Jepha's head and in the midst of all the noise and the rushing and the concern Jepha starts to doze off. Shoeless, shirtless, slightly dirty, and worried about Bert's foot, he nods half-asleep.

He's not sure how long for – time's always the first thing to go with sleep – but eventually Bert's smuggled away from them by a couple of nurses, one so large that he could just have scooped Bert up and carried him like a dog or a baby instead of making him half-hop, half-shuffle to one of the doctors.

Jepha sits up and chews on a rough-edged nail, watching Quinn pretend not to check out one of the nurses. Tallish guy with obviously bleached hair and a round face; Jepha realises he's started checking the guy out himself when Dan flicks him in the ear and mutters, "Remember, if you do, you stop before the finish line. Or you owe me _everything_."

Quinn says, "Shut up about your fucking retarded bet."

When they get to find Bert again he's sitting on the edge of a gurney with his foot in a cast. "Don't touch it until it dries," the nurse – not the cute one – says, and rushes off, looking like he's slept maybe once since he started working. In his whole life.

In his whole life.

"Bert," Jepha tries again, rubbing sleep goo out of his eyes. Bert looks okay. He's grinning to himself and sniffing a rubber glove; Jepha guesses he's still supremely fucking high on painkillers and couldn't give less of a fuck right now.

"Jephareeeee," Bert says, flicking the glove at him. "You should so seriously get like a, a, a, a, a, _hahahha_, a sexy nurse outfit."

Jepha very deliberately does not look at Dan.

Quinn says, "Why can't _I_ have a sexy nurse outfit?"

"Because you're a fucking pig," Bert says in the same gleeful drawl, "and you'd make my baaaaaalls melt. I want Jepha to dress up like a sexy nurse." He stares at them like he's just made an important proclamation on the state of the band and they're going to fucking like it; there is probably no point in arguing with Bert's drugs about him _not_ actually dwelling in a musical dictatorship. Arguing with his beer in the past has not exactly proven … effective. "JEPHAAAA. You have to dress up as a sexy, sexy nurse."

"Later," Jepha says, trying to stifle a sudden smile.

"No, _now_," Bert snaps, looking around for something within easy reach to throw at him. "You fucking assholes broke my foot. I have like, three bones broken in my foot and my ankle because of you stupid fucking douchebags and _you're going to do what I say_."

"Oh Jesus," Jepha says quietly, finally looking sideways at Dan, who is scratching his balls with utter unconcern. Great.

"I'm going to dress up as an unsexy nurse," Dan says with great deliberation.

"Impossible. Dannifer is automatically sexy." Bert thumps the bed with his fist, and his hand bounces back up. Clearly gurney mattresses have gotten more springy since Jepha last laid on one, or Bert's gone so rubbery with drugs he can't obey the basic laws of physics any more. "Nurse Dan, we gotta goooo."

"I still don't see why I can't be a sexy nurse," Quinn complains, staring at Bert's cast. "You fucking asshole, why did you have to break _three_ bones, that's greedy. ONE. One would have been enough but _nooo_. Bert has to be special."

"That is not a sympathy blowjob," Bert frowns, throwing an empty vomit-tray at him. "Where's my fucking sympathy blowjob?"

"It's in Jepha's mouth," Dan says.

Jepha clamps his mouth shut and shakes his head.

"It _was_ in Jepha's mouth but you won't stop whiiiiniiiiing so it went away. He swallowed it. We have no blowjobs … on _this_ day."

Bert looks so crestfallen that for a moment Jepha almost considers relenting.

* * *

Hunched up alone on the second sofa, Bert scratches disconsolately at the skin at the top of his cast. "This fucking … blows _and_ sucks," he growls, digging his fingernails into iodine-yellowed skin. "It iiiiitches and I can't – fucking – ARGH QUINN MAKE IT STOP."

Quinn picks up something from the sofa beside him at random and throws it at Bert; going by the rest of the slippery pile around it, it's a red, heart-shaped lollipop – some promotional thing. Dan had a whole box of them off some girl he met and now there's hundreds of them dotted all over the fucking place and probably breeding.

It's raining outside, the angry and determined rain of a sky that doesn't get much opportunity to express itself with precipitation and which is making the most of it, and the day is unusually dark. Jepha and Quinn make a small wall of loosely-dressed and uncombed person among half the sofa cushions, playing a very lazy and uncompetitive game of Rabbit Racing on the Wii while Dan sleepily ruins their concentration by _winning a whole lot_, stretched out on the floor over a runway of cushions with his Wiimote raised behind his head and his chameleon eyes barely even looking at the screen.

"You know what would make it better?" Bert continues, unwrapping the lolly and messing up his hair all in one grand, theatrical gesture.

"A ball gag?" Dan suggests quite dryly.

"Rohypnol," Quinn offers, slumping further into the gap between the remaining cushions.

"Laryngitis," Jepha remarks, nearly elbowing Quinn in the face as he attempts to avoid having his rabbit fall off the edge of the course. In the face of the studio flooding it's a fairly spiteful idea and not much like him at all – Quinn stares at him for long enough for his own rabbit to come to a halt.

"SYMPATHY," Bert screeches, punching the sofa cushions next to him. He's stranded there on his own, a pillow on his lap bearing the marker-pen-defaced visage of some cute kid's TV character with a bald, arrowed head.

"Ran out," Quinn mutters. "Oh you fucking whore's pussy, Jepha, I'm going to get your ass for that."

"No sympathy for the devil," Dan confirms.

"Live porn," Bert insists angrily.

Everyone watches as Jepha tries very, very hard to look disinterested and fails dismally, his rabbit falling off the edge of the track and his Wiimote flopping loose in his hand as he grimaces; everyone, that is, except Dan, who doesn't lift his head off the floor until his jingling blue rabbit has bounded over the finish line and done a stupid little dance. Jepha's face twitches around a solid line of a mouth and he fidgets with his lower lip. "What?"

"I want more live porn," Bert reiterates, lolly in mouth, scratching the sweaty gape at the top of his cast again, "to take my mind of the FUCKING itching or NO ONE SLEEPS."

"Jesus Christ," Jepha groans, covering half his face with one hand.

Dan tosses his Wiimote to Bert who, with his usual brilliant coordination, completely fails to catch it until it smacks him in the belly. Quinn snorts. Bert's potbelly is one of life's happier recent developments; he thought he'd always prefer the scrawny, underfed fuck he first met but it turns out that being able to pinch an inch makes him even happier.

"Pick your player," Dan says, still on his back. "Boo, doo, doo, doo, boo, doo, doo, dee, doo, this is the menu music and I will do it until you pick, doo, doo, boo, dee, poo…"

"… did you just say poo?" Quinn frowns. He's pretty sure Dan said poo. Dan's not exactly infamous for making sense.

"_You_," Bert points at Dan with the Wiimote. Dan raises one arm in a lazy but poker-straight rock salute before letting it thump back onto the floor like the string's been cut from it. "And … QUINN."

"Wha'?" Quinn jerks, temporarily distracted, his fingers still hurrying in the process of helping himself to a lollipop, except the whole fucking pile keeps sliding away from him and he can't get a grip and his fingers are pretty fucking stoned from this morning, and, and, Bert just said something. "Wha' 'bout me?"

Bert waves his lolly imperiously, tucks his hair behind his ear and promptly gets the one (red, heart-shaped, and sticky) stuck in the other (matted, greasy, but still adhesive). "Get on Dan's dick."

Quinn and Dan give him the finger in something close to synchronicity, Dan's arm flopping over his own chest and Quinn's over the sofa arm for maximum impact. "Fuck yourself," Quinn adds.

Bert jabs one of the pimples on the Wiimote emphatically and scowls at them. "I'm pressing the sex button now."

"You're pressing the fuck you button," Quinn corrects, mussing up his own hair, "fuck you. Fuck you. Beep. Fuck you fuck yooooou beep."

Jepha gets up abruptly, picks up an empty cup, and shuffles out with his pants at half-mast, slipping down his thighs. Unless they've started making _really_ low-riding underwear for guys, he's gone commando, and his crab-ladder and pubes are starting to sprout again.

"Quiiiiiiiiiinn—" Bert whines.

"I don't want dick in my ass. Fuck your retarded game." Quinn folds his arms. The Wiimote has vanished, probably inside the sofa, and right now he isn't getting up to look for it. He tries to kick Dan's foot and misses, which doesn't improve anything. Jepha's … oh yeah, Jepha's in the kitchen. Hiding. Clever Jepha.

There's a raspberry. "Pfft. You always want something in your ass," Bert asserts, rolling the Wiimote between his hands. "You butt-ho."

The sofa cushions are really fucking hot. Quinn sinks further into them and pretends he cares about the menu screen on the TV enough to try and bore a hole through it with his eyes. "But not _dick_."

Dan, who is _still_ trying out for a role as a very lumpy rug, raises a hand limply. "My dick is much like fingers," he says helpfully in that stupid fucking dumb foreign guy voice he likes so much. "Dan has dick-fist."

When Quinn glances in his direction –and he wasn't going to, it just fucking happens sometimes, his gaze drifts towards Bert like a, a, a compass to north– Bert's examining a booger on the end of his index finger, and says thoughtfully, "We _could_ use a Wiimo—"

"NO!" Jepha shouts from the kitchen.

"No," Dan agrees. "You cannot play Rabbit Racing from inside Quinn's ass." He steeples his fingers and says in a passable imitation of Mr Burns, "That would not be wise." His horizontal Simpsons is better than his vertical, Quinn thinks.

"I wasn't gunna," Bert says, wiping snot on the pillow.

Dan raises an eyebrow and Quinn lets his arms drop by his sides. Well. Into his lap. He's not a huge fan of dick in his ass, it feels... Well. It. He's just not. It feels, it feels not as nice as. Anyway, he just fucking _isn't_, but that doesn't mean he's not a bit, kind of. And his hand is warm and his dick is sort of a semi-semi-semi-on, like he can feel it's got potential but no one else can see apart from the bit where he's having a surreptitious grope and _fuck off, Bert_.

"MarioKart," Bert says succinctly, going after another booger. LA is not, Quinn has noticed, good for Bert's nasal passages.

"NO VIDEO GAMES IN QUINN'S BUTT," Jepha yells.

Something skids along the floor, bounces, and comes to a rest next to Dan's shoulder. Dan reaches across himself, picks it up, examines it, and holds it up for Quinn to see.

Just because Quinn knows a sachet of lube when he sees one doesn't meant he's just going to hop on a fucking cock for Bert's amusement.

_About ten minutes later_…

Bert frowns. "_Quinn_, you need to rock your hips more."

The heart-shaped lollipop comes out of his mouth with a slobbering noise that sounds very little like a _pop_ and a lot like a dog throwing up. He waggles his cast at them meaningfully, along with his eyebrows, and the frown morphs into a horrible grin.

"_Daaaaaaaaaaaaaan_," his whine turns into a screechy sing-song half-way through, "You fuck like an old _maaaaaaan_…"

Quinn, his wrists lightly but firmly trapped in circlets of Dan's huge rough hands, sweat in his eyes and his thighs burning and his ass wide and weak, frowns back at Bert. "Fuck _off_. Dan, throw something at him."

"Hands full," Dan points out distantly, pushing up with his hips. "Uh. _Jepha_. Hit Bert for me."

Quinn's not quite sure when Jepha came back into the room, armed with an iPod, a bowl of tea and a complete and total absence of interest in the charade taking place; possibly he doesn't know because he was too busy explaining that just because he had his fingers in his own ass he wasn't going to be getting on any dick any time soon and Dan could put it away while Bert whooped and snickered and punched the air.

Jepha takes his headphones off, sliding their padded weight around his neck like a yoke to focus blearily on the room for the first time. "Huh?"

"Hit Bert," Quinn and Dan say almost at the same time, one voice breathy and the other half-grunting. Quinn rocks forward on his knees and chews down on his lip, a short _nnn_ undermining his indignation.

"Don't hit Bert," Bert suggests in a Sesame Street kind of voice, "Bert is horribly injured," he points at his foot, "because of ALL OF YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES."

Jepha sighs and pulls his headphones pointedly over his ears again; a second later he yanks them off and stares at Dan and Quinn. "How long have you two been … without _telling_ me?"

"Been what?"

Jepha waves his hands around.

"What? Swatting flies?"

"FUCKING," Jepha snaps. He doesn't seem pissed so much as confused. In fact, he looks _totally fucking baked_. Quinn suspects him of having a crafty and unshared smoke up in the kitchen, because Jepha is a motherfucker.

Dan shrugs, an interesting gesture while lying down and humping his hips slowly into Quinn. "Let go my hands so I can fucking smack you," Quinn complains.

"No."

"Why?"

"Because you'll fucking smack me."

"Fucking," Jepha repeats in a mumble. He sounds kinda half asleep in the brain.

"You threw lube in, what were you expecting, skate tricks?" Dan snorts, and the movement gives Quinn another small electric shock from the balls up. It's hard to pretend Dan is actually a quite large, warm dildo when he keeps moving and talking and stroking the inside of Quinn's wrist and having a dick in his ass.

"Poor Jepha," Bert pouts, slobbering lolly-spit like a bloodhound drinking strawberry slushie. "Didn't want them to start without you?"

Quinn squints at Jepha, who rolls bloodshot eyes and makes a face. Not baked, then, just tired and hungover and not properly shaved and sort of grossly hot; Bert pats the seat next to him invitingly. "You can share my heartopop."

Jepha abandons his tea to fate, picks up three more lollies in one hand and scoots over to join Bert. "I got my own. And I got you another one."

"I _love_ you," Bert says distractedly, evidently more focussed on Quinn's attempts to stay still and rock his hips at the same time _and_ keep a straight face – it's not going well. "QUINN. TAKE YOUR SHIRT OFF I CAN'T SEE YOUR NIPPLES."

He doesn't have to look to know Bert's pointing the Wiimote at him; normally Quinn needs no pressure to take off his shirt, just an excuse or a beer or the day to have a Y in it, but Bert's been playing chicken with 'fucking unreasonable' for ages now and Quinn is about ready to lay the smackdown on his crippled ass.

"No," Quinn suggests, trying to give him the finger with his wrists still caught between huge hands. "Dan, let _go_, I need to flip that bitch off."

Dan shakes his head and humps his hips; Quinn makes an utterly involuntary sound and bites his lower lip hurriedly. He's not intending to slice into the skin at the back of it, but that's an improvement on looking like a whore. "Jepha," Dan says, "flip Bert off."

Perhaps predictably, Jepha flips Dan off instead.

"Bert's sitting next to you," Dan corrects, informative and serious. "Me Dan. He Bert." He jiggles his hips again and Quinn swallows another noise. "This Quinn. Bounce, Quinn, bounce."

The space between Quinn's balls and Dan's belly is like a sauna, hot and sweaty and uncomfortably homoerotic; his butt itches from banana-rash, and he's acutely aware that Bert's staring at his silly-coloured hard-on (red, dark red, so hard) disappearing up under his t-shirt's hem, while he does ugly, salivationulation-type things to that fucking candy heart thing like some really unwashed butch schoolgirl.

It's a cheap trick but it's working; while Quinn's ass is stretching (and Dan's every out-breath pushes maddeningly against his fucking, his, it has a name, his fucking perineum) and his brain's already dribbling a bit out of the end of his dick, now his dick's complaining that no one's sucking it and he can't even jerk off because _Dan_ \- FUCKING DAN – Dan who he is fucking – won't let go his fucking wrists.

"So you're kinda frustrated now?" Dan asks with a smile Quinn's only ever seen him use on Jepha before. He's got to know what's coming, 'cause he tightens his grip on Quinn's wrists right _before_ Quinn tries to jerk his hand away and fucking punch him.

"Suck my dick," Quinn substitutes. It's meant to be a snap but it comes out too breathy and almost inviting. His face is hot and his ass is sore and his thighs are tight and trembling. All he needs to do is get his hand on his dick and he'll be gone in two, three strokes, seriously. Just one. Hand.

"Can't reach," Dan smirks, not even trying. "Jephaaaa—"

"_NO_," Jepha says, then, "Sorry, Quinn, but… no," in a less pissy voice.

"FUCK SORRY," Quinn growls, trying to pull his hands free. Dan's grip is stronger even than it looks and all Quinn achieves is making himself even more wound up as he jerks back against Dan's dick with the movement, jerks up against Dan's dick inside him, jerks back and the friction on his prostrate makes him sweat and gape. Dan's fucking _dick_, which is warm and human and weird and a dick, in his ass. Oh no.

There's another slurping _pop_. "Money shot," Bert says, and Quinn can't focus his eyes any more but he's willing to bet that Bert's got his stupid candy in one hand (saliva-sticky; Quinn's dick brushes against his t-shirt, urgent and hypersensitive, and he whines, he goddamn whines) and the Wiimote in the other, a look of concentration and impatient on his freaky little face.

Dan's grin is distorted as Quinn goes cross-eyed. He says in a really _shitty_ pretend British butler voice, "Allow me, sir."

"You-fucking—" Quinn grunts, but Dan's hands are so fucking stupidly monkey-huge that he can squeeze Quinn's wrists almost together with just one. The other massive paw is – "_FFFFFffffff_." – is hot and tight, almost too tight, choke-tight, Jepha's-preference-tight, around Quinn's aching, desperate dick.

So perhaps he'd prefer loose and sloppy, like Bert's hands, but right now a touch is all it takes. Two swift, hard, almost vicious jerks and Quinn's balls hit the point of no return. He vaguely acknowledges Dan saying, "Look at that, Jepha, that's what coming looks like. Remember coming?" but there's more important shit on his mind and, pretty soon, over his thighs and Dan's belly.

There's solemn applause from Bert. "I pu-tick-ul-lee liked the Vinegar Face," Bert says, art critic in a cast, as Quinn's spine goes to gravy and he folds down into Dan's crotch like a deflated bouncy castle.

"There's a dick in my ass," Quinn says, because he's fucking observant. There's also sweat on his face. "And it's still. Uh."

"Tumescent."

"What?"

"DAN HAS A BONER IN YOUR BUTT."

Quinn makes another face. There's a dick in his ass, and he's not playing Bert's stupid game any more. As soon as he can move his thighs he's getting the fuck off and, and lying on the floor or something. Possibly finding an ice-pack to sit on. Sex is awesome, it just shouldn't _hurt_ afterward—

"Where you going, Quinn-a-ree?" Dan says quietly, one hand resting on Quinn's thigh.

"I have to shit," Quinn says crossly. He does, too. That's the other part that fucking sucks. His gut is making protesting movements.

Dan takes his hand off Quinn's thigh abruptly. "Okay, you have to get the fuck off me right fucking now."

That's a fantastic-fuck plan but Quinn's legs are still not cooperating, and every time Dan says something his belly moves and his dick moves and that's kind of painful and also kind of rubbing his prostate which is just sort of weird and Quinn is never, ever, ever doing this again. Kinda.

"Get the fuck ooooooff," Dan repeats, slapping him in the thigh. "Get off my dick, get off my dick if you're going to shit."

"Get off his dick if you're doing to shiiiit," Bert sings from the sofa. "Get off, get off, get off, dick of shit, shit dick, doo dooo."

"Not into iiiit," Dan says, whacking Quinn on the thigh so hard his fucking teeth rattle. "No no. Do not shit on Dan's crotch. Get off."

"OW," Quinn grunts, and with shaking legs and some help from Dan's hands he manages to get himself the fuck off Dan's _stupidly big_ fucking dick; falls sideways, hits his head on the floor, and whines. "Owww." He rolls onto his back and tries to close his thighs or squeeze his ass shut or something. His stomach makes another protesting wiggle. "Ow my ass."

"Enema," Jepha says, and from the slimy pop Quinn guesses he's just pulled the lollipop out of his mouth, but all Quinn can currently see is the fucking ceiling and his own hands. He feels a lot like he just shat a baby already.

"What the fucking fuck," Quinn puts his heel against the carpet and pushes. He scoots about six inches over the carpet and the skin on his back burns; so those are the motherfucking options: shit on the floor, or carpet burn.

"Enema beforehand," Jepha says with the weary voice of someone who knows exactly what the fuck he's talking about, and Quinn is very grateful his imagination's not that great.

"I still have to poop," Quinn mutters, pushing himself along the carpet with his other foot. Ow. Ow.

"There's something stuck to my elbow," Jepha mutters without conviction. Quinn couldn't give less of a fuck what's stuck to Jepha's anything; if he doesn't manage to shove himself to the bathroom in the next ten minutes he's really going to shit on the floor. He turns his head. "It's ..." Jepha grabs at it and frowns. It's a half-eaten lollipop in the shape of a heart, largely covered in fluff, hair, and grit.

"MINE," Bert shrieks, and Quinn lets his hands fall over his face.

* * *

Bert raises both eyebrows, then pulls one down with his finger so he can look quizzical properly. Quinn groans. "So," Bert says thoughtfully, "what you're saying is you _don't_ have cystitis any more and I can punch you in the cock again?"

Pointing out that he never had it in the first place may or may not be futile. Quinn opts to fold his arms and sneer instead. "I'm saying either you suck my dick right fucking now or I find someone else who will." He glances around the room, pretending to search for someone. The sad truth is, until Dan gets his ass out of bed or Jepha resurfaces, it's just them. Driving each other crazy and talking about dick.

All he gets in return is a pout. "I have a _mouth ulcer_," Bert says. Which – either he's a fucking lying liar who lies, which Quinn knows he fucking is, or he wasn't rubbing salt into his gums last night and shouting _I'm Gerard Way and I'm a liar and a coke whore_ to an increasingly disinterested Dan and Quinn. And Quinn's pretty sure he was, on account of being bored shitless by the same old same shit. Bert, meanwhile, swivels on the sofa, his cast maintaining position, and yells, "JEPHA!"

"Don't be an asshole," Quinn sighs, trying to sound reasonable, "suck my dick." He, what's the word, he totally sounds, what the fuck _is_ it, it begins with a c, Feldy used it, what was it –

_Conciliatory._

Whatever. He's making a reasonable request and Bert's a douche. That's the important part.

"How abouuuuuuuut," Bert trills, sliding back onto the sofa with a _whump_, his foot bouncing in the air, "how about I suck your asshole instead?"

Quinn realises he should have a snappy comeback to that, and he would, but his balls just take control of his brain sometimes and this is one of those times. He scratches the side of his face and crosses his arms again, trying to keep his features still. Bert probably just means that to be fuckheaded. Almost certainly he does. He's not going to threaten to eat Quinn's ass after he just callously refused to blow him, that would be … entirely in keeping with the inconsistent McCracken Quinn knows and, all right, yes, fuck off, _loves_.

There is, he also realises, a fucking enormous silence he should have been cussing Bert's mom in.

"I SAID," Bert shouts, slapping the sofa, "how about I suck your _asshole_ instead, asshole?"

Fuck it. Might as well take the risk. Maybe Bert actually fucking means it. Quinn takes a breath and says in a smaller, more embarrassed voice than he thought he was going to, "_Yesplease?_"

"Oh my god," Bert says, apparently stunned, or at least using something like indoor-voice. "Oh my god." He's grinning like he just heard the best fucking joke in the history of ever and, and, and _fuck him_.

Quinn tries to keep his arms folded and his face pissy. Fuck Bert if he's going to take it like that.

Bert's eyes widen to cartoonish proportions as his smile turns from amused to one of those devil grins that intimidates photographers and charms the shit out of whoever it's pointed at in spite of anything else he's just done. "QUINN ALLMAN," he breathe-shouts, "you dirty fucker."

"Shut up," Quinn snaps. Oh yeah. His face is hot.

"Oooooooh," Bert continues, his grin broadening again, like someone's winching up the sides on fish hooks, "Ooooohh. Ooooh. Quinn's a _dirty fucker_."

He's already fucking regretting it. Quinn makes a grab for Bert's hair, giving up on the whole bullshit where he's meant to be dignified and shit, but broken foot or not Bert is a wriggly little bastard and he's too fast for Quinn.

"JEPH," Bert shouts, not taking his eyes off Quinn as he lunges out of his way, "you know Quinn's a _dirty fucker_?"

Somewhat to Quinn's surprise, Jepha actually materialises in the doorway. He's got a towel around his waist held in place with one hand – Jepha hips are too skinny to keep these thick bath-towels up on their own – and his hair is far beyond a mess. It looks like a hurricane went at it. His chest hair is starting to grow back in weird patches, and there are circles under his eyes; he looks hot, Quinn acknowledges in an abstracted kind of way, but then Jepha always does.

"No?" Jepha asks, stopping in his tracks. He sounds cranky, and he's wearing socks. Blue ones.

"He wants me to _eat his ass_," Bert says in a mock-scandalised stage-whisper, shielding his mouth from Quinn. "Dirty fucker."

"Then I think you should," Jepha says, already on his way to the bathroom, stepping around discarded Doritos bags and tangles of video game cables with deliberation. He's definitely, definitely pissy about something, all his words are clipped short and his shoulders are high. "_Someone_ has to get off around here and it's not going to be fucking _me_."

"Huh," Bert says, momentarily distracted as Jepha all-but-stamps off to the bathroom, "what got up his ass?"

"Nothing," Quinn says, unable to keep the smirk off his face, "I think that's the problem." He stretches, and gets the fuck up. All the better to get away from Bert's stupid-ass chanting.

"_I_ think you're distracting me from the important scientific discovery I just made," Bert says, his finger in his nose.

"Scientific what?"

"You're a _dirtius fuckupalus_," Bert points at his face. "Dirty. Fucker. Fucking dirty fucker. Fuckatron de la dirt." He's on his foot, his good foot, standing on tip-toe and balancing with his cast like a fucking tripod, getting up in Quinn's face with difficulty. "Dirty. Fuck. Dirty. Fuck. Dirtyeeeee."

It's not worth pushing him over.

It's not.

Bert kisses him, hands to hip, and Quinn lowers his head, gets his hands into the unwashed nightmare that is Bert's half-dreaded matted up hair-nest. If liking Bert's tongue in him makes him a dirty fucker, he's a dirty fucker. Bert tastes of morning after and Quinn doesn't give a fuck.

Bert mumbles something into his teeth, which is almost certainly 'dirty fucker' on the basis of previous evidence. Quinn says, "Homofag," back into Bert's tongue and knots his fingers through the lanolin-heavy mat on Bert's head.

Bert yanks his head back and gives Quinn one of those searching looks, like he's scanning his molecules for defects (or he can't see at this close range, what the fuck ever), and says, "I'm-a gonna eat-a your ass-a, dirty fuck-a," undoing a button at a time on Quinn's fly, a button to coincide with each 'a'.

"You know, Bert and dirt rhyme," Quinn points out, pulling his pants down over his hips and onto the floor, nearly cracking his chin on Bert's head. No boner tenting his shorts yet, but it'll sneak up on him like it always fucking does, sneak up on him like Bert with a bucket of, of pee. He's already starting to get warm thinking about it.

"No _shit_," Bert digs his fingers into Quinn's ass and grins up at him, "Bert and dirt rhyme, Bert and _hurt_ rhyme."

"Whatever, tell it to Jepha."

"You know what rhymes with Quinn?" Bert loosens his grip, but not by much.

"Win?" Quinn suggests.

"Uh-uh." Bert has his fingers under the waistband of Quinn's shorts, tickling and teasing the top of his ass, his chin on Quinn's sternum like a fucking blunt knife, and his mind apparently set on disobeying basic facts of phonics.

"Does too," Quinn points out.

"Dirty fucker rhymes with Quinn." Bert digs his chin into Quinn's chest and smirks at him, eyes half-closed, fingers on the uppermost curve of his ass.

"Your mom rhymes with Quinn," Quinn snorts, concentrating on digging Bert's chin – which also rhymes with Quinn – back out of his flesh before it leaves a fucking bruise.

"My dick rhymes with Quinn," Bert says, pressing the aforementioned article into Quinn as best he can, with that cast dragging his balance off; Quinn stands very still.

"Your mom rhymes with my dick." Quinn tries not to catch his breath as Bert yanks down his shorts and catches the elastic on his fledgling hard-on.

"What else can she do with something so small?"

"Oh, if we're talking about _small dicks_," Quinn snorts, grabbing at Bert's crotch, "PEANUT RAPIST."

Bert pushes his nails into Quinn's bare asscheek and makes him hiss and squirm – stupid, because if Quinn falls right now Bert's going to lose his balance too – but Quinn snarls at him anyhow. He has no fucking idea what the fuck it is Jepha even gets out of shit like this. "Cut it oooooout." He slaps at Bert's arms. "Jesus."

"Get down and bend over," Bert instructs. "Imma stick my tongue up your asshole, eat all your poop, then poop out a pizza for you."

"Best fwiend evaaar," Quinn lisps in a pretend-little-girl voice, and he hits his knees on the carpet so fast they burn, trying to go down and hold Bert up at the same time. He's still not convinced Bert's even serious, that he isn't just going to bite him in the ass, kick him in the ass, or do something else inventively horrible to his ass while he's down here and vulnerable but it's just a risk he's gonna have to take.

"Dirty fucker," Bert says in the same voice. Today, apparently, he's not fucking about.

… about this, anyhow.

His nimble little monkey hands are hot and firm on the inside of Quinn's thighs, more shoving than stroking, as Quinn kneels and Bert slithers to the floor behind him.

"I'm not a fucking, a fucking, an anteater," Bert says peevishly, and Quinn lowers his face into his own forearms, his t-shirt riding up his back, hanging loose below his nipples. He can't even remember what the fuck an anteater looks like. "You look like a, a, I don't even know," Bert snorts. He sounds pleased.

"Anthill?"

"Asshole," Bert confirms, running his hands up over Quinn's asscheeks and rubbing his thumbs just over the dip of his asscrack without actually going into it. Quinn … tingles. "A … nnn … asshole anthill." He lowers his voice and says in a conspiratorial whisper, "a really hot asshole anthill."

Bert rubs his thumbs down the crack of Quinn's ass again and Quinn's knees slip outwards over the carpet, scraping off the skin, leaving his asscheeks spread that little bit further.

One of Bert's thumbs slips down and skates briefly over Quinn's asshole, grazing the tender puckered skin, brushing through hair. Quinn bites the inside of his mouth, presses his nails into the palm of his hand, and tries really fucking hard not to shove his ass towards Bert's face impatiently. Because Bert will never _shut up about it_ if he does.

But Bert's not talking now; Quinn half-flinches at the sudden wet warmth on his ass, Bert's giant tongue cutting a damp swathe through the hair on his butt cheeks. Fucking tease.

His knees are hurting already, rough carpet on grazed skin, and there's no disguising the fact that this position's as uncomfortable as it is humiliating – but Bert, in such a motherfuck of a hurry with everything else, is taking his sweet time with this.

"Asssssshole," Quinn hisses, not even sure himself if it's a complaint or a direction.

He's ignored; Bert pulls his asscheeks further apart with the heels of his hands and Quinn hurriedly helps him by bracing his thighs wider, his forehead already smearing sweat onto the insides of his elbows. Bert's hair tickles him and then, then, _then_ there's hotwet_yes_ across that nameless stretch between his ball and asshole, moving up.

Quinn doesn't quite clamp down on his tongue in time to prevent a moist noise with no bones, a sound comprised entirely of vowels, from flopping out of his mouth and onto the floor.

He can _feel_ Bert grin against his ass. Feel him mouth 'dirty fucker' before he sets his tongue back to the base of Quinn's balls and licks slowly up over the taut-stretched skin.

That tongue smears saliva thick and slippery over the inner curves of Quinn's asscheeks, coats the approach to his asshole with a river of spit; Bert's hands cling to Quinn's hips, steadying them both, and Quinn pushes sweat out of his eyes with his forearm. Shit. Fuck. _Yes_.

"Shit," Quinn observes and there's an explosive giggle right by his asshole. Nothing he compares it to is going to do justice to the sensation, but fortunately Bert composes himself and starts … _yes_ … teasing and tickling Quinn's fucking screwed-eye anus with the devil-pointed tip of his smart, smart tongue.

Maybe it's appropriate that the two lone words now circulating in Quinn's brain and occasionally smacking into each other are 'fucker' and 'dirty'.

Quinn feels his knees take a sideward scrape again – there's more of his fucking skin stuck in the carpet now – and tries to keep himself in position, largely through willpower. He's aware it's a quality he has in limited supply around sex. And Bert. And sex with Bert.

The _hotwetwrong_ tip of Bert's tongue slips, brief as a fork of summer lightning, through the ring of muscle and beyond.

Quinn makes another one of those noises he doesn't want to own up to.

Bert's lips close against Quinn's asshole in the obscenest kiss there is and Quinn gums at his own arm. This slithery, will-ruining nirvana of mouth-on-ass might go on forever or ten seconds but he's hanging right here in the ache of his swollen fucking dick and Bert's right hand brushing on it once, twice …

"Put-your-hand-on-me-" Quinn jerks, getting his teeth out of his wrist, "- FUCKER."

Bert obliges by rubbing his hand – formed into a perfect flip of the bird – over Quinn's belly so he _knows_ he's being flipped off.

The sound Quinn makes may even qualify as 'anguished'. "BERT YOU FUCKING ohmygod."

Bert's palm is sweaty and perfect on the blood-flushed head of his dick, sweaty and perfect like always. _Quinn's_ hands clutch at empty air as Bert begins to stroke, his lips painting Quinn's asshole saliva-coloured.

His legs are the first part of him to start getting weak, his legs and his spine, a tremor in them expanding out in a cloud of heat that leaves him unable to remember where any of his body _is_. Except his knees (hurt), his face (hot), his dick (holy fuck), and his damp, damp asshole (holy fucking _fuck_).

"Fffffuuuuuu … BERT," he grunts as Bert gets his wrist at the wrong angle and nearly punches him in the fucking balls, _how_ he even manages Quinn's not even sure, "look – uhhh --- what you're --- oh god – fucking asshole—"

Bert mutters something against his ass, his lips move, his tongue moves, and his hand picks up a quicker tempo.

Quinn sinks his teeth into his own wrist, clawing back on some pretty fucked-up fucking words. He's not going to fucking say shit like that, Jepha-standard shit, words that aren't really his, aren't really him. He inhales hard and harsh through his nose, makes a gross gurgling, snorting noise; he's not saying any fucking thing. All that 'I'll do anything you want' shit, all that 'yours' shit … why bother saying it when Bert clearly already fucking _knows_?

Coming is a fucking cliff and Quinn goes - _comes_ \- tumbling over it. He can just about feel Bert's hand get wetter and wetter and his dick starts to hurt, and hurt with the touch of skin even in all that wetness but Bert isn't stopping; Bert's mouth sides off his ass and the first thing Quinn hears from him as his head spins and his breaths go right on getting all fucked up, the first thing he hears is, "Dirty fucker."

Through a mouthful of saliva and his own arm Quinn groans, "Whatever, _you_ just ate my ass."

It's not especially clear. Anyone _not_ Bert probably would understand a word of it.

Bert wipes a thick handful of Quinn's come over his own thighs. "Dirty fucking fucker. You got babyjuice on my fingers."

"Your fault," Quinn sighs, and Bert lurches, then starts doing something annoying and tickly to his ass. Quinn rolls his face along his arm and tries to luxuriate in the motherfucking afterglow.

"Quinn," Bert says in a disgusted voice, still stroking or tickling or whatever the fuck he's doing to the top of Quinn's ass, "your asshole tastes of poop."

"No shit," Quinn mutters, and starts laughing.

"No, _shit_," Bert says, taking his hand away from Quinn's ass. Something's cold on there. Whatever, Quinn doesn't care. His knees hurt, but he doesn't care. Quinn doesn't fucking care about _anything_. "Seriously, I need to wash my mouth out."

"Fine." Quinn cannot even be bothered to take his face off the floor.

"With your beer," Bert continues, struggling to his feet. There are a lot of crashes and bangs, but eventually Bert's voice is a little higher up, and there's the _clump stamp clump stamp_ of retreating cripple.

"Fine," Quinn tells the floor, unsure if he's ever going to move again. Fuck. He tries to roll over, but his muscles are busy liquefying, and his brain is still made up largely of pretty sparkly lights. Bastard fucking stupid ass-orgasm. Leaving him sprawled out on the floor with his ass out and only the vaguest sense that he should give a fucking fuck about that.

Someone else walks past him. Someone wearing blue socks and dripping water.

Jepha starts to laugh.

"Fuck off," Quinn mumbles into his arm. "It isn't funny. Also, ha ha fucking ha, at least I get to come."

Jepha's still laughing, and a drip of body-temperature water falls onto Quinn's thigh. "You know Bert wrote on you?"

"Whatever," Quinn still doesn't fucking care. He yawns into his arms. "Pull my pants up fooooor meeeee."

"Yeah, get fucked," Jepha says, still snickering.

"I just did," Quinn explains.

Jepha stops laughing. "Don't you want to know what it says?"

Quinn's knees are starting to sting. It's possible the post-rimming flop is wearing off, and no matter how hard he tries to hang onto it, he's going to have to get up and do something about his pants. And possibly stop Bert getting ass-flavour lips all over all his beer. "No. Pull my paaaaants up I can't move my aaaaarms."

"No," Jepha says, and another drop of water falls on his legs. "I guess you're going to have to stay there with your ass out forever."

"Nooooo," Quinn groans. "Dan's going to park a bike in my butt."

"I don't think Dan's going to want a bike rack with 'Poop lives here' written on it," Jepha says, and starts laughing again.

"Uh?" Quinn tries to twist around and look at his own ass. It's about as much of a success as it always is, with the added impediment of him still being half made of rubbery nothingness. "What? What the fuck?"

Jepha toes him in the leg. "You have **Poop lives here** written on your ass, Quinn," he snickers, and with that, he's gone.

 

* * *

"You smell of breakfast."

Jepha raises an eyebrow but no one is watching. He's still pretty sure that whatever else Quinn smells of, it's not breakfast. Unless "stale beer and dried sweat" now counts as breakfast to Bert now. He wouldn't put it past him.

"You smell of socks."

That much is at least true. They're pretty old socks, too.

"You smell of your mom."

Jepha hides the Wiimote down the back of the sofa and sits on his hands. This has the potential to turn into a throwing-things fight and they only just replaced the last one Bert broke.

"_Your_ mom, actually."

"Whatever, you smell of … fuck you."

Jepha is not wondering what _fuck you_ smells like because he's pretty sure it's that fucking enormous turd they had to break up with a knife before it would flush. No one is owning up to it but everyone is also pretty sure it was Bert.

"You smell of suck my dick."

"You smell of Dan's pee."

His hand stops in mid-grope, and Jepha stops trying to arrange the Wiimote into a position where it's easy for him to find but impossible for anyone else. He's not sure he wants to know how _either_ of them came to smell of Dan's pee, but at the same time he really fucking does.

"How do you even know it's Dan's?"

"I have a special gland. You smell of poop."

Jepha rolls his eyes and turns back to the bouncing "game paused" logo on-screen.

"You smell of shut your mouth."

"Bert, you just … fucking _smell_."

"I have a _nose_, fuck you."

This is indisputably true. Jepha doesn't even need to look to check. Bert very definitely has a nose. He also usually has a finger in it, and from the sounds of things that's – Jepha twists – oh yes, that's the case now. He's expecting Bert to, maybe, wipe snot on Quinn's face and inform him that he now smells of boogers, but as always nothing is predictable; a new player enters the fray. Jepha pulls the Wiimote out of the cushions and points it at Dan's face, pretending to control him.

"You know what this smells of?"

Dan waves his t-shirt past Quinn's nose like a flag and Jepha can't help but smirk at the expression on his face because for once the _I am your lord and master and you will clearly do whatever I say and not just punch me in the neck_ grin is being aimed at someone Dan _isn't_ tormenting with some stupid fucking sex bet. Hah. Ha.

"Weed?"

"Correctilicious, you win a prize."

And that thing that Dan does, where he taps the end of his nose like it's a buzzer, that's still irritatingly adorable and makes his heart flutter. Which makes a nice change from his balls aching, but doesn't actually alleviate the ache any. Jepha wonders if smacking himself in the crotch with the Wiimote counts as getting himself off, cheating by putting himself out of commission, or just annoying Quinn by wrecking the Wiimote.

"Is the prize your mom?"

"No, it's—"

"Then I don't want it."

"It's a ride on the Dan pony!"

Bert's shriek is not as deafening as usual but it _is_ the high-pitched glee of a Bert who has just said something he finds extremely funny.

"Do _I_ get a say---" Dan begins.

"NO!"

"The Dan pony is _tired_, Bert."

Jepha rolls his eyes at Dan. What. How can Dan possibly be tired when he isn't doing anything except move furniture and drum and completely fail to let Jepha get off; that can hardly be exhausting. Fucking. Fuck. It must be the most relaxing activity in the world, stopping Jepha from getting off. It's not like he has to ninja-sneak around preventing him from stealthily --- Jepha looks down at his crotch, and his hand.

Apparently _someone_ needs to stop him from rubbing shit against his crotch when he's not paying attention.

"The Dan pony complains too much. TO THE GLUE FACTORY."

"Hey," Jepha protests weakly, as Dan leans back on his heels, drops into a crouch, and smacks him hard on the back of the wrist.

"Stop defiling the Wii."

* * *

The smoke in the room is so thick it's like looking at a bombsite through stained glass. It's like they're swimming in layers of air; Jepha pretends to dog-paddle for a minute and Bert folds up like a book, gasping into his knees as he sits kindergarten-style on the bed—and by bed, Quinn means mattress, mattress that still smells vaguely and deeply unfortunately of banana. Quinn reaches out with his toes pointed to try and jab Bert in the back, but he's too far away and Quinn's too comfortable propped up against the wall, to slither down further so he can reach him. Also, the bong is here. On the bedside table. And by bedside table, Quinn means the stack of books on the floor next to the banana-mattress.

Dan plucks one of Jepha's hands out of the air like he's hunting insects and, using it as a pivot, twists Jepha's whole body round until he's sprawled on the floor instead.

Quinn looks up from the bong – it's awful, a red-tinted glass thing with a hand-painted yin yang on it, so awful that it's either something Bert bought while high or something a fan gave them – and says, "Was that judo?"

"Is there helium?" Dan counters, plopping down with a thump next to Jepha's head and stroking his own scalp approvingly. His hat is somewhere underneath his thighs; Jepha tugs on it to absolutely no avail.

"You squashed your hat."

"No." Quinn takes a hit and holds it until it starts trickling out of his nose.

"You squashed your fucking hat," Jepha repeats.

"Why not?" Dan demands in slow-motion mockery of anger, "When-a I want-a helium-ay there should-a be-a heel-ee-um, have you people no _respect_?" He bats Jepha's hands away from his hat and twists his fingers through Jepha's ink. "You dissin' me with yo' helium … hold-out … ing … _boom tsh tsh tsh_…" His beatboxing is not exactly pro standard.

"HEEEEEEEELEEEEEEEUUUUUUUMMMMM," Bert sings, kicking something off his bunk. "It's deaaaaalin', doooone …"

"WRONG."

Bert throws a very flat and damp pillow at Quinn.

"I WAS FINISHING THE LINE, FUCKHOLE, IT RHYMES," Quinn shouts in a hurt voice that is spoilt by both the croak of smoke and the giggles in it. He throws a book of matches at Bert's head. Fucker better recognise his _art_.

Meanwhile, Jepha's looped his forefingers through Dan's beltloops and is giving them concerted tugs in a vaguely downward direction; Dan is at first too busy walking his fingers through his own unwashed, slightly-too-long hair to notice.

"Oh my god there's a floorshow," Quinn observes, taking another hit. He attempts to sounds disinterested, which clashes a little with the way his free hand has crept up to presses lightly against his crotch, more playing with his nuts than making a move to jerk off. "Will you just look at thaaaaat, Mabel."

"I, um, like, can't, cuz I have, like, Botox in my eye," Bert says in his best valley girl, serious as the grave, hugging the one remaining pillow to his face for dear life. "My eyeeeeeee. If I blink I will, like, totally go blind." He makes a short, sharp raptor noise.

"Rape," Dan says flatly. "Rape, rape. Also, undo the fucking _zipper_, you idiot." Jepha looks up at Dan, pleading though his eyelashes.

"Just saying rape doesn't actually make it rape," Jepha mumbles into Dan's thigh, still looking up at Dan, his cheek rubbing against his jeans in a steady rhythm Quinn knows feels good, because he's slowly rubbing his palms against his own thighs and the rough weave of the denim feels amaaaazing.

"You forget how zippers work or something?" Bert says, paying vague attention but mostly wrapped up in inspecting a lock of his own hair, half twirled around his finger like a preteen girl on the phone.

Jepha says nothing. Quinn's pretty sure this means _yes_, he's totally forgotten. It's the dignified silence of someone just stoned enough to know they'll sound _totally stoned_ if they try and talk right now.

Dan takes pity on them all and demonstrates how zippers work, slow and steady.

Jepha's eyes are flickering between Dan's long fingers and his face, where dark dirty hair is striping his cheek.

The look Jepha's giving Dan feels almost as solid as a hand on his dick, Quinn thinks, though that could be because _his hand is on his own dick again_. A gentle, pot smoke-cushioned plume of arousal curls through him as Jepha tugs at Dan's jeans again, and Dan oofs and wiggles so they slide down over his ass.

Bert snickers. "Raaaaaape," he says, at the same time attempting to do a headstand Quinn knows he's capable of sober, and ending up rolling over and off the edge of the mattress, sprawling on the floor on his back, sprawled in an arms-out Jesus-pose. Dan kicks his jeans off the end of his leg and thump onto the ground next to Bert's head, disturbing his hair with a little puff of air. "I can smell your crotch, Dan," Bert says to the ceiling, quite happily.

"My crotch can smell you," Dan replies.

Quinn snicker-coughs into his hand. His palm smells like weed and balls. "You mum smells like _my_ crotch," he chokes out. Dan and Jepha are silent, but Bert's shrieky giggles spur Quinn's own coughing laughter on.

When Quinn can open his damp eyes a little, his ribs aching from laughing too long at—at whatever he was laughing at, he realises the reasons both Jepha and Dan are so quiet: Jepha's mouth is full, his hand and lips on Dan's dick, and Dan's head is tilted back loosely on his neck, his mouth open and a low, pleased groan spilling out into the air, thicker and more intoxicating than smoke.

Jepha's other hand is pawing gently and aimlessly at Dan's naked hip, the side closest to Quinn, running his thumb over Dan's hipbone like he's testing the edge of a knife. The hypnotising repetition of the movement is almost enough to distract Quinn from the point where Dan's dick disappears into Jepha's mouth, not deep, but Jepha goes down slow and bobs back up steady, less like a tease than like he's just taking his time, moving at the pace of pot, unhurried, unworried.

Dan's fingers wind in Jepha's hair, a half-petting, half-haltering grip, a guide and praise. Quinn thinks, _pet_, and snickers to himself again, but stifles it against his curled hand. He probably couldn't interrupt them if he tried, tackled Bert from where he's perched, head cocked and watching the floor show, and had a screaming wrestling match right there.

Quinn gropes blindly for the ugly red bong he's becoming fond of—almost solely because it's one of the few glass ones that's survived longer than a few weeks—and manages to pick it up without dropping it onto the floor on the other side of the mattress. He feels like he's in slow motion as he gropes around his thighs for the matches and then remembers he's thrown them at Bert. Has to look away from where Jepha's licking up Dan's cock like it's delicious frozen fucking snack food, and Dan's hands tighten in Jepha's hair. Quinn can see the flash of metal as Jepha's tongue darts out. Has to look away for. For goddamn. Matches. Right.

"Bert," he tries, and holds his steady fingered but swaying arm out towards Bert, who is similarly entranced by what's happening on the floor, and Quinn says again, "Bert. Bert. Fuckass. Asshole. Bert!"

Before Bert finally turns, slow as a kiddie's carousel… but a better fucking ride than any impaled plastic unicorn, Quinn thinks, and loses his train of thought to laughter again.

"What? _What_?" Bert asks, impatient but still slow-speaking. Quinn wonders if the world's slowed down, if he's slowed down, if they're all in synch at this glacial pace in this hot fucking room, or if Quinn just doesn't really need to smoke more.

Bert throws the matches at his head and they hit him in the temple then tumble between his spread legs. Oh, _matches_.

He packs a bowl with the last little bit of pot that's hiding, feeling kind of pleased with himself everyone has apparently forgotten there was anything left (to be fair, if Jepha was sucking his dick right now, he'd be distracted too). He lights up, sucking a thick cloud of smoke down easy as water; he's too stoned now to pay any mind to the tickle in his throat, the burn in his lungs as he holds it, holds it, blows a thick stream of smoke out towards Jepha and Dan.

It dissipates before it reaches them, leaving visible eddies in the air, like silt disturbed at the bottom of a clear pond. Quinn puts the bong down on the edge of the bed and shifts, sliding lower down, but not so low he can't see as Jepha kisses the underside of Dan's dick, aimless and sloppy, and bumps his snakebites against the head when he's made his spit-shiny way to the tip.

The bong rolls off the mattress with a damp thud and Quinn could care less if it's finally broken. He rubs his stomach and dips his fingers under his waistband to scritch against his pubes, a slow, pre-jerk off movement he's been doing since he was old enough to realise you don't always have to bang one out in three minutes with the bathroom door locked against familial intruders.

"Stick a finger up his ass," Bert commentates. Demands, actually, Quinn thinks.

"Interactive porn," he says out loud, mushy-mouthed and breathing heavier than he'd thought, like there's a brick on his chest, pushing down on his smoke-soaked lungs.

"Yeah," Bert says, half a reply to him, half encouragement as Dan's fingers tighten in Jepha's hair again and his thighs tense as his hips push up, an uncontrollable twitch like he wants to fuck Jepha's mouth, but slowly. Slowly. Jepha dodges out of the way and licks again at the head of Dan's dick. Dan hisses.

"Stick a finger up his ass, Dan," Bert repeats.

Dan holds up his middle finger in Bert's vague direction.

"I _said_ up his _ass_, DAN," Bert crawls off the edge of the mattress, hands and knees thumping onto the ground from the half-foot drop like lead weights. "Find, I'll do it myself, you lazy motherfucker." He gains his knees unsteadily, and shuffles over until he's nearly pressed up against Jepha's bent back.

Jepha smiles with his mouth full of dick when Bert puts a hand on his ankle, not actually doing anything, just holding and kneeling behind him. Assessing. Jepha's smile gets wider and the corner of his mouth twitches, trying to contain himself, and Quinn watches Dan's hand shift through his hair like a slow lumbering plough through a field of wheat and settle on the back of Jepha's neck, only to push inexorably down as his hips push up and Jepha's eyes flutter closed as he takes Dan in—concentration, until his nose is nearly flush with Dan's pubes.

Dan makes a noise that sounds like the beginnings of a _oh fuck_, but isn't quite _words_, and rolls his hips, pushing in-_in_ without letting Jepha go like maybe he would if he were getting close, but slower, deliberately slow, maybe. So Jepha can't breathe. So the flush on his cheeks gets _deeper_ and his hand gropes at his dick.

Because Jepha is nothing if not a kinky motherfucker and Quinn is appreciative of the choked-off groans he makes as he pushes forward into Dan's crotch, drooling around his dick and staying where he's put. Quinn squeezes his dick though his jeans and groans a little, exhaling though his nose. Dan's hand is still, _still_ on the back of Jepha's neck, still holding him there and Jepha's eyes are open now and he's looking up—he chokes a little as Dan finally pulls back, his chest heaving.

Jepha's hand is still in his own crotch now and his other hand goes lightly to his own throat, a gentle stroking collar of fingers.

"Hey," Dan says. Jepha's eyes seem to snap to his face, the first quick thing Quinn's seen since he started smoking today.

Dan's hand's still on the back of Jepha's neck and he pulls him closer again, an unsubtle hint, unfinished business.

"Hey," Bert says, like an echo of Dan, but his voice isn't so low. "I can't get my fingers up your ass if you're wearing jeans, Jepharee."

Jepha collapses like a rag doll, rolls sideways and kicks his jeans off, wiggles out of his underwear and rolls onto his front, ass in the air in a way that's so _obvious_, more obvious than the way his dick curves hard against his belly—more obvious than Quinn's hard on. He pops the top button on his jeans and watches the slow motion ballet through the haze: Dan shifts and winces, gets to his knees, pants around his legs still, and Jepha's spit wet on his dick.

Bert giggles and spits on his fingers, and without a question and without any messing around, works a finger up Jepha's ass, and Quinn can _hear_ that Jepha's sucking Dan's dick again, messy and wet and obscene, but his eyes are on Bert's fingers, disappearing past the curve of Jepha's spread ass cheek, pushing inside him. Quinn can't look away.

He sweeps his shirt up so it sticks around his armpits and opens his jeans.

"You'd better be getting that out, bitch," Bert says, shoving another finger into Jepha.

Quinn takes a second to get who he's talking to, but when he glances up, Bert's bright, bright bird-egg blue eyes are on him, a _gotcha_ smile like a red devil on his lips.

"Only if it's going in your mouth, bitch," Quinn replies and shoves his hand down his pants further, a pretend-protective gesture that really just lets him get a better angle on himself while making a show of not giving in to Bert.

As if he won't soon, when he glances between Bert's eyes and Bert's hand and realises he fucking _means_ it about Bert's mouth. That mouth, as he watches, quirks up at the edges, and Quinn throws him half a stupid-ass fucking heart hand, his hand moving slow through the air and with his eyes half-shut it almost has a hazy comet trail after it. Could just be his eyes watering from the smoke, still, rubbed red raw and probably he looks like he hasn't slept for a week, because when he's stoned he _looks_ stoned.

Bert smirks like he can read Quinn's thoughts (maybe, fucking probably), and does something to Jepha's ass that makes Jepha let out a groan and a choked off grunt and Dan jerks forward further into Jepha's mouth and Quinn squeezes himself and groans "_fuuuuuck_," low and hoarse, a chain reaction, a series of slow motion explosions one after another after another.

Like that, Quinn's coming, barely enough time for him to choke out a jumbled curse and undo his fly and he's jerking himself through it until his stomach is spattered with white. He lets his head smack back to the pillow, a soft thump, letting his tense stomach muscles relax him from the bow he's been pulled into, his shoulders hitting the mattress. He closes his eyes, just for a second, breathes deep— and falls asleep.

* * *

Quinn comes with a quiet _whumph_ of air from his lungs and falls asleep faster than anyone should, an orgasm and a head full of green (all the green, actually, because Quinn is a seasoned bogarter of all things smokeable).

Jepha notes his transition from occasional soft giggles, to heavy breathing, to the semi-regular snoring of sleep with only the vaguest interest. He's distracted by the horribly _torn_ feeling of his own orgasm coming on while his balls say _YES_ his brain says _NO_. Bert's fingers in his ass and Dan's dick in his mouth and his own hands wandering to his dick, twisting the ring at the head and then jerking himself off harder than anyone ever does without him asking.

He not supposed to-- but _fuck_ he wants to-- he squeezes his eyes shut and concentrates on Dan's dick in his mouth, sucking hard, and Dan's thighs are doing that jerky thing they do when he's close, and he's fucking into Jepha's mouth and Jepha concentrates for that moment on swallowing, swallowing, not choking-- the taste, the fact his lungs are burning -- keeping himself here, with Dan's hand on the back of his neck, while Dan comes and comes.

When he's done Jepha pulls back and collapses with a shaky breath like he's the one that's just come, living vicariously since he's not a-fucking-lowed.

Bert's fingers are still in his ass though, and when Jepha opens his mouth to say, no, sorry, Bert will have to stop, Bert crooks his fingers and licks Jepha's spine, the slick patch of his lower back where his shirt's ridden up, Bert's tongue barely warm on his hot skin, and what comes out of Jepha's mouth is a short, breathy _uuuhhh._

"Hey, Jepha," Dan says, somewhere out of Jepha's line of sight.

Jepha's face planted on the floor with Bert's fingers in his ass and his own hand on his dick still, trying, trying not to move. He can't answer Dan right now, doesn't want to in case, _because_ Dan's going to make him stop.

"Hey," Dan says again. He's closer now, tugging on Jepha's hair gently, twisting until Jepha turns over like a curled up rubber band righting itself. Bert's fingers stay in his ass, twisting, and Bert ends up between his legs, Dan's knees behind his head. Dan's hand is on his dick, sure and just as hard as Jepha likes without needing to be told, so unexpected Jepha nearly comes right there, even though Bert's fingers aren't pressing on his prostate anymore.

Jepha's so close, so close, Dan's hard, _knowing_ hand on him. He tries to choke out something, maybe warn Dan-- when Dan leans sideways and picks up something out of his line of sight; the next thing he experiences is _not_ the mind-breakingly intense orgasm of five days' worth of not coming but a half-pint of very cold, slightly grotty water over his head.

"AUGH," Jepha jerks away from him like a dog from a bee. He's dripping wet and cold and this is not, not, under any circumstances, at all, ever, _sexy_. Compared to his sex-flushed skin, the water feels like someone's been melting icebergs in it. "I hate you. I hate you. I fucking haaaaaate you."

"But you don't want to lose your beeeeeat," Dan sing-songs, putting the glass out of Jepha's flail radius and giving him the You Can't Punch Me, You're Too Sub grin (which Jepha has proven wrong on at least two occasions, even if it didn't actually have any effect).

"Yes I do," Jepha says miserably, looking at the rapidly diminishing remains of a burning boner with the same sense of despair as a kid at an eight-day party balloon.

"Don't," Dan says, kissing him on the mouth. For a minute Jepha just opens his lips and lets Dan's clever fucking tongue ride over his, pushing his mouth against Dan's jaw and half-suffocating himself, his hands already clamped to Dan's cheeks; then he remembers he currently fucking hates Dan and everything he stands for, especially the bit where he stands for _not letting Jepha get off_, but it still takes a minute to stop kissing him.

"Fucking cunt ass bitch ass cunt," Jepha complains, rubbing cold water off his face with his hand.

"I love you too," Dan snickers, pulling up his pants.

Quinn snorts something that sounds like "get out of my fucking socks, Bert," and he's awake again.

"What'd I miss?" He mumbles, more awake but still sounding slow and stoned.

"Dan being a cunt," Jepha says.

"Dan's cunt," Bert says, and laughs into Quinn's arm, where he's curled up next to him on the bed.

"Why the fuck are you _wet_?" Quinn asks. Still stoned, half-awake and with his hair sticking up in every direction, the look of confusion that goes with the question would be enough to make Jepha laugh, if he wasn't, actually, feeling more like killing someone.

"Fuck you," Jepha says, and spits what tastes like bong-water on the floor.

* * *

Dan's watching him over the table and everything else in the room is obliterated in a wave of don'tfuckingcare because by now even being looked at like that makes his dick twitch hopefully. Jepha mouths _please_ and mimes prayer, his hands flashing the message in ink, _pleaseplease, please sir can I come_ like some kind of fucked up Oliver Twist. Dan just shakes his head pleasantly, points the neck of his beer in a silent toast, and smiles at a waitress.

Jepha's going to fucking kill him. This is what rage feels like. Not being allowed to come for six days is what rage feels like.

Dan licks his lower lip and the waitress looks startled. Jepha realises that for the last minute and a half, he's been unconsciously grinding his crotch against the bar. Like a freak. Like a monkey in a zoo. Six fucking days. He tears the label off his beer and thinks _assholeassholeasshole_ so loudly he thinks Dan must be able to HEAR him.

"... You drinking?" the bar man gives him this slightly freaked out look and Jepha hauls himself back together as best he can.

"San Miguel..." Jepha says, hoping he heard the question right. And that his hips are still. And that Dan's going to drag him into the toilet and fuck him against the mirror so he can see Dan's face as he comes and then _fucking let me come you asshole_.

Dan puts a hand on the small of his back and slides it down over his ass. Holds it there. Jepha twitches. Cock and hands and spine. "I fucking hate you," he says, but he can't actually bring himself to move away from Dan's hand

The bottle arrives in front of him with a lime wedged into the neck like Dan's dick into his ass -- Jepha ducks his head while he's fiddling in his wallet for a bill. Oh right. The entire world is full of fucking - someone just opened a bottle and the beer foams out of the top like a -- shit. Twenties?

"Nah," Dan says in his ear, so easily dismissive Jepha wants to bite his face off and fucking, fucking, fumble his wallet enough he drops it

"Change." The bar man's already gone. The tip jar is right there. The door to the bathrooms is right there. Dan's hand is right there. Jepha's dick is RIGHT THERE and oh yeah, they're in public and it's four in the afternoon.

He kind of wants to punch him. Not least because it'll involve getting punched back. _Whyyyyyyy did I agree to this?_

Dan smirks beside his face and mutters, "You. Look hilarious."

Oh that's right.

He agreed because doing what Dan tells him to makes him hot.

Stupid.

Stupid stupid stupid hot.

Dan's hand is on his skin. Like a promise. Jepha really fucking wishes he'd at least asked when this ... this ... FUCKING TORTURE was going to be over but nooooo. His dick jumped to attention and he just followed along. Dan's fingers are below the lie of Jepha's waistband and the barman gives him a very weird look. That _muah_ noise was apparently not as internal as he thought. Fuck.

"You know you're an asshole?" Jepha says out of the side of his mouth.

"I know you have an asshole," Dan retorts, tugging on the back of his jeans so hard that the front digs into his belly. And the fucked-up state of Jepha's libido right now is that even the sudden pressure on his gut makes him think _sexsexsex_.

Though that might just be the proximity of Dan, so close that Jepha can smell him, feel the heat of his skin.

"I thought you'd forgotten," Jepha says, so sour he surprises himself.

"I know there's a bathroom," Dan adds, and Jepha doesn't need to turn around to know that Dan's making _that face_.

He could just stay here and lean on the bar and drink his beer and – and he can't try to distract himself with video games any more. Every time he plays Katamari Damacy now he gets this almost incurable urge to jerk off and it's _all Dan's fault_. So he could just stay here and lean on the bar and drink his beer and think about, about, about nothing, or he could just give in and …

Jepha discovers that his feet are already walking him to the bathroom. Traitors.

The bar bathroom is kind of new and chrome-y and a lot cleaner than Jepha's strictly used to; it smells of air freshener rather than stale piss and there are none of those suspicious puddles of possibly water standing on every flat surface like in so many bathrooms. Someone _has_ left an empty beer bottle with a lime wedged in its throat by one of the hand driers, though. It's still in the real world, he's not imagining it in some sex-deprived delirium, and Jepha's briefly struck by the thought that the beer bottle is choking.

He's also struck by Dan's hand on his ass, and skips forward on impact, nearly losing his balance. More beer in his blood than he first thought, maybe, and his cheeks are already warm – both sets, ahahah – with the glow of attention. This is what _desperation_ feels like. Fucking hell. He's never going to complain about needing to pee again, not when an aching bladder has fucking nothing on his balls right now.

Jepha latches onto Dan's mouth like a leech to a leg, doesn't even give him a chance to set his beer down or push them into the pretend privacy of a cubicle. Just slams his lips up against Dan's and his hips to hips and grabs Dan's wrist to pull his hand to Jepha's throat or his dick or – it's not _even_ a gay bar and shiny bathroom or not there's maybe this little hint that if anyone catches them like this there's going to be a motherfucking fight.

All that does is make Jepha's heart beat faster.

Dan shakes his arm free of Jepha's grip and locks it around his waist instead, pulling them together and sending warm shocks through his body. Jepha opens his mouth further just as Dan pulls back and finds himself gaping into thin air, unexpected beery drool hanging off his chin.

"What do we say?" Dan says, half-hissing the 'S' between his teeth, half-lisping it, _ssssssthay_.

"_Asshole_," Jepha suggests, pushing his hips into Dan's, grinding into him the way he'd been trying _not_ to grind into the bar ten minutes ago. He is fucking hard already, his scalp and skin prickling with frustrated electricity, his breath shallow, short, and just short of panting. "_Dan_."

"Magic word?" Dan prompts, pushing back apparently on autopilot. "_God_," he adds, just under his breath.

"Please," Jepha scowls.

"Properlyeeee."

Jepha gets on his knees so fast he can _hear_ the bruises forming. It's a little damp down here but nowhere near as bad as the last bathroom floor he knelt on; he clasps his hands around each other, holds them up begging-style with his tats showing: **PLEASE, PLEASE**. "_Please_, Dan."

Dan pats him on the head and smirks a slightly wobbly, breathy smirk. It's the most condescending gesture _ever_, and it should not tug on his boner like that; this is what _easy_ really is. Jepha bites his lip and holds Dan's gaze, his hands up in prayer still. _This_ is 'easy', getting hyper-horny because someone patted his fucking head, touched his fucking ear … while he's kneeling on the floor, okay. Kneeling may be a factor.

Dan's voice isn't all that steady. "I think you should be naa-aked."

There's probably a reason why he shouldn't but right now Jepha can't think of it; he has his t-shirt off and into Dan's hands so fast he gets a friction burn on his back, and gets his pants down around his thighs before Dan grabs him by the face, the chin, tips his head back and half-squats to kiss him. Jepha stops fucking around with his pants and gropes the back of Dan's neck, his mouth open wide and his skin prickly-hot with _need, want_, prickly-hot with _put your hands on me_.

His dick's nestled between his belly and his thighs, the curve of his body rubbing the head of it against his bellybutton almost. Every move he makes, every tiny shift of his weight, drives him that little bit crazier with it.

Dan pulls back again and Jepha could just about fucking murder him for it, but Dan's face is flushed and his lips are wet and his hand is hot on the stretch of Jepha's throat, stroking, stroking; Jepha could forgive him anything right now. Almost anything. "Ffffuck," Dan mutters, his fingers sliding clumsily down to Jepha's collarbones, his free hand battling with his belt. "Ask me, I'll say yes."

Jepha seizes the opportunity and Dan's gaze again and waves his tattoo past Dan's eyes. "_Please_."

Dan pushes his forehead to Jepha's. "Please what?"

Jepha bites back a frustrated growl and puts his fingertips to Dan's lips; the wet of saliva on his fingers gets into his balls in a jolt of _want_. "Please. Let me _fucking come_."

"In my hand," Dan murmurs, his voice sticky and sweaty and close to Jepha's face, his aforementioned palm flat on Jepha's belly _just_ above his fucking, fucking dick.

"Yes. Please." Right now he couldn't care less if Dan wants him to come up his own fucking _nose_ as long as he actually finally fucking _gets to_ come.

"And you lick it off after," Dan mutters in a very breathy whisper, taking a second to spit on his palm. Jepha tries very hard to sit still on his own legs and not arch impatiently towards Dan's wet fingers.

"NNrrggggh. _Yes_. Please. _Dan_." Each word is forced out between gritted teeth, on the billionth beat of a racing heart.

"In the bar," Dan says in his ear, his face sweaty and hot on Jepha's cheek, his hand mind-destroyingly tight and right around Jepha's dick, damp with spit and sweat, rough as pumice and hotter than a volcano. "Where people can see you." He's barely making sense now, Jepha's blood racing in his ears as Dan's hand moves slowly and emphatically up and down, his fingers flexing in a wave that washes sane thought from Jepha's head. "Sssssuck it off."

Jepha's hands scrabble for Dan's zipper but he jerks his hips to the side and gives Jepha a brief kiss that half-steals the air from Jepha's lungs, his fingers still moving. "I'll … do-anything-you-_want_-" Jepha pants, in vague control over his mouth but not his mind, "just-please-"

The door creaks but nothing follows the sound; Dan rubs his face against Jepha's like a cat saying hello and his fingers flex up and down, up and down, spirals of light in Jepha's brain, blood in his dick, all his skin on fire and connected in a web of nerves that's almost beginning to take in the air _around_ his body too. "I'm going to fuck your brains out," Dan whispers indistinctly, his lips on Jepha's ear, "I am going to fuck your fucking _ass_ off.

"Yes—"

"I mean it." Dan's mouth touches his ear again and Jepha can't hold down an answering moan; their sweat-soaked hair entangled like tree branches, like kelp. "I'm gonna make you come so fucking hard you end up inside _out_, oh my goddddd…"

"Nnnhghhggg. _Please_, Dan, I –"

The bathroom door _bangs_ violently on its hinges and a blast of cold, air-conditioned air hits him in the chest as Dan leaps away from him. It takes Jepha a second to focus on _who_ is yelling but the yelling itself is pretty much immediately very clear. It's like a punch in the balls.

"GET. OUT," The bar manager shouts, shaking with rage, "OUT. I don't care who the fuck you think you are, this is a decent bar and I –"

Jepha tries to scramble to his feet and pull his pants up at the same time. It's not a vastly successful venture and his dick hurts and horniness and guilt and irritation mingle into a giant and ordinarily uncharacteristic FUCK YOU he's having difficulty keeping unsaid.

Dan dumps his shirt on him. "You couldn't have waited one more minute?" he complains as Jepha's shirt slides onto the floor.

But the bar manager is a man of one idea and he's sticking to it. "GET. THE FUCK. OUT. Or I call the fucking cops –"

"Jesus," Jepha sighs as the bar manager contrives to herd them out without actually touching them at all. His jeans still aren't done up and he holds them closed with one hand – the denim chafes his persistent boner in all the wrong places and it _hurts_, the good hurt and the bad hurt all at once – his shirt lies abandoned on the bathroom floor.

Since this is a 'decent' bar: no shoes, no shirt, no service – people are staring at them.

_Some_ people are laughing.

Specifically the two very familiar people in the corner booth are wetting themselves with hysterics, one collapsed over the table and the other giggling like such a lunatic that people are staring at _him_ too.

"_OUT_," the bar manager repeats, pointing at the door.

"My shirt –" Jepha protests, working on his button fly.

"OUT."

"Those guys in the corner are paying our tab," Dan says crossly.

"OUT."

"I'm going to kill them," Jepha says with a horrible calmness as realisation settles over him like a boner-killing cloud of Not Fucking Fair. Dan nudges him in the small of the back as they step into the cloying heat of late afternoon.

"Find an alleyway first."

Jepha's still so pissed at losing his shirt that he nearly fails to follow this. "What - _oh_. Yes." Dan tickles the back of his neck and Jepha's dick gives a hopeful jump as his knees almost flee the scene. "Yeah," Jepha agrees, a smile stealing over his face, "they can wait."


End file.
